Surprises
by ICanStopAnytime
Summary: Where might our Friday Night Light friends be some twenty-five years in the future? This is an alternately dark and light, bitter and sweet portrait of the future that will touch on Julie, Matt, Coach Taylor, Tami, Gracie, Landry, Tyra, Luke, Becky, and Tim.
1. Saturday Guarantee

**Author's Note:** I enjoyed stepping into the future with my last piece so much that I'm going to do it again, even a little farther this time. However, this story in *no way* connects to my last one. I'm starting from scratch in crafting these characters' futures. Oh the possibilities!

**Chapter One**

After twenty-five years of marriage, Julie can read Matt's signals as if he was an air traffic controller and she was a pilot. She's been circling for a while now, but he wants her to land. She's been in out of the master bathroom and the closet, brushing her hair and removing her makeup and putting on her night clothes and checking that she's got her best business suit laid out for tomorrow's big meeting with the search committee.

Obama University is looking for a new provost. The school opened its doors twenty years ago in Washington, D.C., and Julie's been its Assistant Provost for Undergraduate Education for three years, before which she was an English professor at Northwestern. She's inexperienced compared to most of the applicants, many former presidents of other colleges, but she hears from the Assistant Provost for Diversity and Inclusion that, after the debacle with Provost Hernandez, Obama U wants to hire from within. She also hears they specifically want a woman to assume the mantle. Of all the current assistant provosts, Julie's the only female.

She doesn't really want to rise to the top through some kind of politicking affirmative action, but Matt says not to look a gift horse in the mouth, to just get the hell up there and ride it so fast and so well that they kick themselves for not giving it to her sooner. Besides, he reminds her, the provost position would pay quite a bit more than her current position. They have one daughter finishing her last year of college and another they're helping through her second year of law school. (Lori and Anne are twins, but Lori took a "gap year" to backpack across Europe before college, while Anne went straight into a university with a full years' worth of National Placement Credit). Matt's not exactly raking in the cash. He's teaching art part-time to high school students. Sure, he sells an original painting or sculpture every now and then, but he has expenses too—supplies.

It took Matt a while to adapt to being the second bread winner. The first year Julie's income outstripped his, his ego took a pummeling, but Julie did her best to keep it well stroked. She went to her mother for hints and tips on how to best build-up a husband, because she knew her mom had a special gift for making Dad believe in himself and that Mom's salary also outstripped Dad's for a six-year period.

Julie systematically put her mother's advice into action, until Matt was so overwhelmed with tentative pride in her admiration that it was all he could do to keep the tears from pooling in his eyes. Their pay differential has rarely bothered him since, though he still sometimes feels deflated by the lack of recognition of his talent, however often she assures him that his day is coming and that, sooner or later, his greatness will be discovered. "Yeah," he grumbles, "when I'm dead."

Matt's sitting now with his back leaned against the pillow, which is leaned against the dark oak headboard of the king-size bed they bought when they moved to the District. They were able to buy all new furniture not only because her salary increased, but because they downsized and took a capital gain on the sale of their four-bedroom Chicago townhouse. Now that D.C. is the fifty-first state and its governor has made calculated efforts to attract business, the local economy has boomed and housing costs have declined dramatically. Also, with their daughters out of the nest, they didn't feel they needed more than a two-bedroom condo. Matt uses one of the bedrooms as a studio.

They can walk to the Mall from their complex, which replaced the old Cotton Annex. The condo development was, against much opposition, given permission by the new state government to rise almost as high as the Washington Monument. Matt initially protested the assault on aestheticism and tradition, until he saw with his own eyes how beautiful the interior was and how perfectly the lighting in the second bedroom would suit his artistic needs, and then he agreed to buy the place, money-hungry developers notwithstanding. Besides, Julie had fallen in love with the condo on the internet, and as Coach Taylor says, "It's damn near impossible to resist a Taylor woman once she gets a notion in her mind."

When Julie first saw the pictures of the place, she started screaming, "Matt! Matt! Come here!" until he ran out of the kitchen with the chili spoon still in his hand, dripping red and brown splots all over the carpet they'd just steam cleaned before putting their Chicago townhouse on the market, saying, "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

At the moment, Matt has just exhaled an impatient, put-upon sigh. He's wearing plaid boxers and a white T-shirt, and he's got his hands crossed over his stomach. It's Saturday, which is supposed to be a guaranteed sex night.

Julie's work schedule can get rather hectic, and they were having problems connecting the first year after they moved, so they agreed to establish this minimal Saturday guarantee, and then work in what additional pleasure they could whenever they could. In her twenties, or even in her thirties, Julie would have thought scheduling sex an absurd proposition, but now she's just grateful they both still want it and are committed to making time for it.

But sometimes she likes to irritate Matt, for reasons she can't quite explain, except that the fiery flash of annoyance in his blue-green eyes makes her tingle just a little. So she's been deliberately drawing out her "stages," which is what he calls her night-time process of getting ready for bed.

Matt sighs again, louder this time.


	2. An Unwelcome Interruption

**Chapter Two**

Juliehasn't put on her usual sweats and Obama University T-shirt. It's Saturday, after all, so she's chosen a tight piece of lingerie. The hem falls just at her thighs, and the silk pulls tight across her breasts. She chose the dark green one, because last week Matt claimed to like it better than her red one. When she seemed incredulous of his preference, he said, "Well, at least you can't say I don't still surprise you after twenty-five years."

(Most of their friends and acquaintances have been married less than fourteen years, and half are on their second marriages. They're always shocked to learn that Matt and Julie were only nineteen and twenty when they exchanged vows. Then Julie tells them her parents have been married forty-five years, and their eyes grow wide, as if she's just suggested the discovery of some alien race.)

"It's getting late," Matt says from the bed.

She brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. Her hair is short these days, and she's surprised how much Matt seems to like it that way, since he resisted her cutting it for ten years, but now that it's grown dark brown, and she's styled it in the latest fashion, he says she reminds him of that supermodel, what's-her-name, that twenty-eight-year old chick who's so popular with his male art students. "I'm not nearly as thin as her," Julie told him, conscious that she can't keep weight off as easily as she used to, and Matt said, "Fine by me. I like something to put my hands on." He's done his best to stay in shape himself, but the six-pack has been replaced by a minor beer gut. He's still got the muscular arms, though, the broad shoulders, the adorable smile Julie will never tire of drawing out of him.

She walks around the bedroom, the silk material shimmering as she sashays, pretending to straighten the trinkets on the dresser, rearranging the candles he's lit, and adjusting the volume on the holographic keyboard of the iEverything, which he's set to play Van Morrison. She turns off the projection so the album cover's not hovering on the wall. In the mirror, she watches Matt turn the old fashioned alarm clock that's resting on the nightstand towards himself, check the time, and then turn it back in its original position. She rearranges the candles again. Then she opens the dresser drawer that is the fourth from the top. She has the top three drawers, and he has the bottom three.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

"I forgot to sort your socks by colors after I did the laundry."

"_I_ did the laundry." He does most of the household chores these days. "And I don't _need_ my socks sorted by color."

She bends over, making sure to position herself ideally for maximum effect, and begins to move the socks about.

It's at this point that he finally realizes he is being intentionally teased, and it is at this point that he throws off the comforter, strides to the dresser, scoops her up with two strong hands on her hips, carries her back to the bed, and flings her on the mattress.

She's laughing when he pins her by her wrists and begins lowering his full lips to hers, but then the doorbell chimes. And chimes again.

"What the hell?" he mutters.

Julie groans.

He curses the whole time he's throwing his casual khakis on over his boxers (blue jeans have been out of fashion for about six years now; you don't see them on anyone under sixty), and his bare feet pad with angry clomps to the bedroom door, which he throws open so hard it might have hit the wall, except that they've installed a doorstop since the last time he did that and punched a hole with the door handle. That incident was precipitated when a gallery owner passed him over for an exhibition in favor of an artist the man wanted to take to bed.

Julie watches him stomp through the doorway. Matt's never been the most assertive man in the world, and he's not violent by nature. If Julie had to pick ten words to describe him, "gentle" would be somewhere near the top of the list. But he's not immune to irritation or anger, and in his forties, he's become less and less inclined to repress it.

She pities whoever stands on the other side of the Saracens' front door.

**/FNL/ **

Matt's hand is lodged in the depths of his hair, which is about two shades darker and a little thinner than it was when he was twenty. He started to see the first flecks of gray this year. Julie assured Matt that the gray made him look "distinguished, experienced, and incredibly sexy."

He unlatches the deadbolt with a rough flick of his wrist and jerks open the front door only to see the doorway to the stair case closing at the end of the hall. Footsteps clamber down the stairwell, but Matt doesn't see anyone, and soon enough his eyes are drawn elsewhere, down to the floor, from which is coming a noxious sound that he hasn't been subjected to in over twenty years.

There, lying on its back on top of a blue blanket nestled in a cardboard box that bears the words "Virginia Fruit Company," is a wailing baby.

"Seriously?" he asks the baby. "People still do that?" He looks left and then right at the barren hallway. "This ain't a church."


	3. The Opportunity

**Chapter Three**

Matt squats down over the Virginia Fruit Company box and peers at the wailing creature. The baby's skin is a light brown, and he couldn't guess what ethnicity it was even if he hadn't given up trying to guess that sort of thing a month after he moved to Chicago. He scoops it out of the box and tries to quiet it. It weighs about twice as much as a football helmet.

From behind him, the door opens and closes and Julie asks, "Is that a _baby_?"

"Well it's not a watermelon." Whatever the box might imply.

It's been over two decades since he's held an infant, and he tries to remember what you do with a crying baby to make it stop. He had to run the vacuum cleaner with Anne, back when vacuum cleaners still made noise. That didn't work with Lori though. She only screamed louder. Lori liked bouncing, but not just an easy bounce, a bounce that required him to squat and spring up, squat and spring up. He begins to do that now with the baby.

"What are you doing?" Julie asks. "It's not a dead weight. Give it here."

Matt hands over the mewing thing. Julie rests it against her shoulder, rubs its back, and it falls instantly silent. It snuggles its little head in, and Matt instinctively reaches out to stroke the soft strands of its black hair.

After the twins, Julie got her tubes tied. She had a lot of complications with the pregnancy, and she nearly died during the emergency c-section. The doctor told her the risk would be even greater the second time around. But apparently she's still got the touch.

"So…uh….what do we do?" Matt asks.

"Well, first we take it inside," Julie says. "Then we call the police."

**/FNL/**

Julie settles on the living room couch with the baby while Matt makes the call.

"They're on their way and they're sending a social worker," he says as he sits down next to her. He puts his feet up on the coffee table, and his heels rest on top of _People Magazine_, against the headline "The Sixteen Sexiest Men Over Sixty."

Neither of them reads _People_, but Landry dropped off the current issue the last time he came for dinner. He picked it up at the last newsstand in D.C., a quaint, historic relic of a printed past where people go to buy "retro" hardcopy versions of electronic magazines. There's one or two such newsstands in every major city, but no one gets magazines in the mail anymore. Landry purchased it, of course, because the head coach of the Texas Longhorns made the list.

Coach Eric Taylor is, according to _People_, the number two sexiest man over sixty, right between Muhammad Bashara, the first ever President of the new North American Union, and the academy award winning director Will Smith.

Mom says that Dad's head has grown two sizes since the article came out, and she's considering an affair with a much younger man just to put him in his place. ("She's joking, right?" Matt asked. "No," Julie said, rolling her eyes. "Five years shy of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, she's finally going to cheat on him." Matt smiled. "Well, Landry's still available." And Julie: "Ewwww! Ew! Ew!" And Matt, laughing and laughing and laughing.)

Twenty minutes later, two policemen arrive with two EMT's, who examine the baby. The police ask a lot of questions, but Matt and Julie have little to tell them. Ten minutes later, the social worker arrives, and she's brought a bottle of formula, which is good because the baby has begun wailing again. She lets Julie feed it, since he's already in her arms.

The police imply that maybe the baby is Matt's, from some secret lover, and that she's left the child on his doorstep for that reason.

"I don't have time for a secret lover," Matt says, which isn't precisely true. His only hard and fast commitment is teaching art for three hours a day (four with commuting), and the rest of the time he works on his own art and keeps house. Julie's at work from eight to six, sometimes later. He could easily have an affair, if he wanted, but the baby doesn't look anything like him, and even the social worker rolls her eyes at the policeman's suggestion.

The police find a note in the fruit crate that Matt and Julie didn't think to examine. "Mr. Saracen - I know you've been a dad before. I'm sure you'd be a good one again. Please take care of him." No signature.

"Do you think it's one of your high school art students?" Julie asks.

"I don't think any of them know where I live."

"Well, there's always the internet."

One of the policemen puts a hand on his hip, just at his gun. "Have you had any pregnant students this year?"

"One," Matt says. "That I know of. But she kept the baby, and I've seen it, and this isn't it."

"Maybe the _father_ was in your class," Julie suggests. "You couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman from the sound of footsteps, I guess."

Matt shakes his head.

The social worker asks, "Do you want to keep the baby until a willing relative can be identified?"

"Just like that?" Matt asks.

"Well, this happens more often than you'd think these days. Child abandonment has increased a bit since the 32nd amendment." The 32nd amendment outlawed abortions after the eighth week of pregnancy. The amendment had the backing both of pro-lifers and those concerned about the economic effects of the recent decline in population. (The 28th amendment made it considerably easier to amend the U.S. Constitution, which is why five amendments have passed in the last six years.) "So, under the Expedited Foster Act, we can do an instant background check on you two, an interview, a quick drug test, and approve you. We can get this arranged starting _tonight_ if you want. Are you interested?"

Matt turns his head slowly to Julie. The social worker and cops leave them alone to discuss it. It's been a long, long time since they've had a baby, and her career is demanding, and that's even if she doesn't get hired as provost. Neither has entirely forgotten how the twins took over their lives and exhausted them, those first few years, leaving them both feeling unappreciated by the other.

Julie was a stay-at-home mom when Lori and Anne were young, for the first five years of their lives. Matt worked three jobs to support them back then – full-time at the art gallery, part-time teaching at classes, and when he could, doing his own art, including occasional commissioned works he found predictable and insipid but that helped pay the bills. Those were tight times, hard times, rocky times for their marriage that made them wonder why they hadn't waited more than four years to have kids, but they pulled through.

"You'd have to be the primary caregiver, you know," Julie tells him. "What with my job." The social worker said it could be up to a year before the system makes a permanent placement.

Matt looks at the baby in Julie's arms and reaches again to touch its soft hair. "I know. But…" There are too many hours in his day. Julie works a lot. He can't fill them _all_ with art. The girls are gone, and they aren't likely to come back. They won't have any trouble at all finding jobs, not those two, not with their mother's brains, and not with the current labor shortage. "I want to do it."


	4. A Case of Mistaken Identity

**Chapter Four**

Everyone is looking at him strangely this afternoon as they mill onto the field for practice. Coach Taylor would think it was that damn "Sixteen Sexiest Men Over Sixty" article if it hadn't been out for three weeks. His players and assistant coaches have already raked him thoroughly over the coals about that.

He didn't know what he was interviewing for at the time. He thought it was slightly odd, the way they were having him sit and stand when he was posing for photos, but he didn't ask too many questions. He just did what he was told and gritted his way through it, like he always did when he had to deal with the media.

Even when the questions shifted from football to his personal life, he wasn't too surprised at first. These football fluff pieces often say something about the wife and grown daughters. They love to mention that Gracie is a "young U.S. Congresswoman," the first ever member of the Sovereignty Party to be elected to national office. (The party was created ten years ago primarily to resist the creation of the North American Union, but now that NAU exits, the party concerns itself with resisting the expansion of its powers.) Reporters like to throw in a sentence or two about how Julie is steering Obama University in a direction that may make it an academic rival for Georgetown. They like to allude to how Dr. Tami Taylor's groundbreaking research on teen psychology is altering the American secondary education system. He's used to all that.

But then the reporter asked a really peculiar question: "After forty-five years of marriage, how do you keep it interesting in the bedroom?"

"Pardon?" Coach Taylor said.

"People often think seniors don't have sex lives, but we know that's not true. Surely the libido declines, but it doesn't vanish completely. So what do you and your wife like to do to mix it up in the bedroom?"

That was when he stood up from the bleachers where he was sitting and said, "This concludes the interview."

But today, his players and coaches aren't eyeing him because of a three-week old article. Something else is going on. He notices that his QB coach, Coojoy Swainson, hasn't shown up yet, and he doesn't tolerate tardiness in players, let alone his coaches. (What the hell kind of name is Coojoy, anyway? These kids today, with their invented names. Thank God Matt and Julie gave their daughters normal, sturdy names. They even went the traditional route, naming them after a relative, to honor Matt's grandmother.)

"We need to talk," his defensive line coach John Tanner says. John is just ten years younger than Eric, so he's a real man's name, of course. He draws Coach Taylor away from the gathered players and to a quiet spot on the sidelines. Three other coaches follow and they form a sort of huddle around him.

"So I take it you haven't seen the internet article? " John asks.

"What article?"

Coach Sanity Mackey mutters, "Oh shit." _Sanity_. Eric's never called the young man anything but Mackey. The guy's a decent enough offensive line coach, but he was Coach Taylor's second choice. He wanted to bring over Billy Riggins from the Aggies, but Billy said he thinks he has a better chance of becoming a head coach if he isn't working in Coach Taylor's shadow.

John continues, "Coach Swainson…he…uh…has been engaged in some inappropriate behavior."

Coach Taylor grips the clipboard he's holding. He's seen lot of inappropriate behavior in the course of his career. When it was teenagers, it irritated him, but kids are kids. It's the so-called adults he can't abide. He wants to brain them with his clipboard sometimes. And now they're talking about one of his own coaches. Coojoy Swainson wasn't his first choice for QB coach (he wanted to bring Jess Merriweather over from the Bulldogs), but he was never given the influence over hiring and firing decisions that he was promised. There have been more external pressures than he anticipated. "What _kind_ of inappropriate behavior?" _Please, God_, he prays silently. _Don't let it be pedophilia. Please, God._

All the coaches look at each other slowly, waiting for someone else to step up and answer.

"What kind of inappropriate behavior?" Coach Taylor repeats, at command volume.

"He's doing one of the cheerleaders," Coach Mackey answers.

Coach Taylor bites his lip. Relief mingles with anger. "She's got to be at least eighteen, right?" At least it's _legal_.

Coach Tanner whips off his hat and scratches his head. "Twenty-two actually. Graduate student."

Eric didn't realize graduate students could be cheerleaders. That's not his department, and he can't tell the difference between a teenager and a twenty-two year old anymore anyway.

Eric shifts his clipboard to his left hand and lowers his cap over his head with his right. Coach Swainson is only thirty. The age difference isn't a big deal, but it still disgusts him. He can't help but think of Julie and that goddamn T.A., even though that was over twenty-five years ago now. Coach Swainson's not really in a position of authority over the cheerleaders, though, the way that T.A. was over Julie. "Can I fire him for that?" Eric's been looking for an excuse to fire him anyway. This is as good as any.

"Well, that's up to the committee," Coach Tanner says.

That's right. He doesn't have the final say. Besides that, the National Employees' Protection Act Congress passed the year before last (despite Congresswoman Taylor's attempt at a filibuster) has made getting rid of dead weight a lot trickier.

"Coach," Mackey says, "that's not even the extent of the problem."

The coaches are all looking at each other silently again.

"Well, gentleman, what _is_ the extent of the problem?"

"It's uh…where and when he did her one time," Mackey says.

"And where and when …" Coach Taylor can't complete his sentence. He can't take this exchange of glances much longer. "Speak!"

"In your office. " Mackey says.

_Chirst._

"And…uh….it was after Saturday's game. After we'd all cleared out and he was closing up. And I guess there was a reporter or a student or someone still around and…I don't know…somehow some pictures got snapped."

"Damn it." Coach Taylor runs a hand over his mouth. Just the publicity the Longhorns need. The media will eat it up. It seems like there's no news today except sex scandals and who's doing who. You wouldn't even know there was a war going on. This story could go on for weeks, and that would be an enormous distraction to the team. "Well at least it shouldn't be any problem to fire him now."

"He may not admit it was him," Coach Tanner says. "The photos…You can only see his back. We only know it was him because he was the one closing up and…uh….Mackey's seen him coming on to her before."

Coach Taylor turns on Mackey. "And you didn't tell me?" he shouts.

"We thought it was harmless," Mackey says. "I swear we all did. We didn't think he was going to follow through. Or at least…not in your office. And not in sight of a camera."

"He's about your height and build," Coach Tanner says. Eric doesn't understand why he's saying it. "And he's got short black hair too. Your hair is still mostly black at the ends. Your cap covers most of the gray." What the hell does that have to do with anything? They're all looking at him like he should know what they're implying, but he's still not putting two and two together.

Coach Mackey pulls out his iEverything and shows Coach Taylor an article. Just above the photograph of an unidentifiable man in a Longhorns jacket and cap apparently bending a cheerleader over his desk, the headline reads: "Second Sexiest Man Over Sixty Still Calling the Plays."


	5. Child Support

**Chapter Five**

Landry Clarke grunts and rubs his temple when his phone rings. He fumbles blindly on the end table until he has his iEverything and sees its Matt. "Why are you calling me so ridiculously early?" he asks after answering.

"Dude, it's four in the afternoon."

Landry sits up and swings his legs out of the bed until his bare feet are on the plush carpet. He rubs his eyes and tries to make sense of the moment. Yes, now he remembers. He went to bed at three in the morning, got up between nine and noon, and then went back to sleep again.

The dark, sunblocking curtains are pulled all the way across the expansive penthouse window. "Siri, end table light, on," he says, and the room is partially illuminated. The tiny residue of bourbon in the glass on the end table gives off an almost golden glow. "I had a late night."

"You got a woman with you?"

"No." He stands up and pads to the bathroom, past the double sinks and then the shower and then the jacuzzi to the toilet, where he asks why Matt is calling.

"Dude, are you taking a piss right now?"

"Yep," Landry answers.

"That's rude."

"Hey, I'm a rock star."

He's not, at least, not in the way he once imagined in his teen fantasies. Rather, he's the owner and founder of LCM (Landry Clarke Music), a software company whose cornerstone music writing software has transformed the modern music industry. There's virtually no one making music today who doesn't use an LCM product in some capacity.

Landry has more money than he knows what do with, especially since he doesn't have to pay Tyra any alimony. She divorced him a year before he patented that "stupid software you're always yaking about" (as she called it), five years before it paid off. As the founder a popular political blog, she was making about fifty percent more than him at the time of the divorce. Hell, he could have asked for alimony and maybe even gotten it, but he didn't.

He gives thirty percent of his net income to his charity foundation, but without a wife and kids, he still has plenty to burn. Two years ago, he bought this penthouse condo in Arlington because that's where Apple moved its headquarters after Microsoft crumbled and Virginia completely eliminated it's state corporate income tax. "I have to be at the epicenter of software development," he told Matt, but the truth is, it doesn't matter where he lives. He can work from anywhere. He just wants to be near Matt and Julie, because they're the closest thing to family he has.

There was a ten-year period when he fell out of touch with them completely. It was just too hard to be around Matt and Julie's twin girls after Carter died. Those girls had lived and thrived for five years, and Carter had died after just five days. It didn't seem just. He hated Matt and Julie for their vibrant children.

Landry and Tyra had met again at grad school, at UT-Austin. He'd gone to get his M.B.A., and she was almost done with her MFA in Creative Writing. (Admittedly not the subject he expected to discover her pursuing.) They hadn't spoken to each other in years, but by then he'd stopped licking the first set of wounds she left him with. First they became friends, and then Landry took the plunge and asked her out again. ("On condition that you don't hook-up with Riggins as long as we're dating," he said. "Just Riggins?" Tyra asked. "Well, _especially_ Riggins.") They dated for a while, and when they had the slip-up, and she told him about the pregnancy, she wanted to abort before the eight-week window closed, but he talked her into keeping it, into marrying him, into giving the conventional arrangement a chance.

A year after they put Carter in the ground, however, Tyra was gone. It shouldn't have surprised him. It wasn't the first time she'd driven off without a word.

They ran into each other once in New York two years after the divorce, argued like cats and dogs while they got drunk together, and then went to a hotel and had angry sex. In the morning he asked if she wanted to try to get back together, and she said no, that she had plans, she had dreams. "I'm not Tim Riggins," he said. "A _real_ relationship with me won't chain you to some rock on a chunk of land in Texas. We can be together and you can pursue whatever dream you want."

"It doesn't work like that," Tyra told him. "I need to be unattached. I need to focus on myself."

"Like you've ever focused on anyone else," he said, pulling on his pants. "Carter's lucky he died." He sat back down on the bed and turned to her for the last words: "Better than having a selfish bitch for a mother." An hour later, he could still feel the sting where she'd slapped him across the face.

Four years later, she called him up and said she might want to try again after all.

"You heard my software's finally paid off, didn't you?" he asked.

"What?" She seemed truly ignorant that he was starting to rake in the cash, and she probably really didn't know back then. It wasn't as if Tyra had ever followed the technology scene. _iMagazine _had yet to publish its article on "Landry Clarke: Rising Software Star." It would be another three years before _Rolling Stone_ printed its feature on "The Man Who Reporgrammed the Music Industry" or _Forbes_ listed him as the fifth richest man in America.

"Look," Tyra said, "I've been with a lot of guys on and off, and I've realized you're about as good as they come. I guess I knew that already, but I was angry about Carter, and I was afraid…I don't know, Landry. I was just afraid. Let's try again."

"Fool me once, shame on you," he said. "Fool me twice, shame on me. And, actually, I think this would be thrice." And then he hung up. That was years ago, and he hadn't heard from her again – until last night.

"How did you even get my number?" he asked when she called at midnight.

"Julie," she said. "I wheedled it out of her." Tyra and Julie had remained occasional friends after the divorce. The Saracens tried not to take sides, but it was clear they felt more sympathy for Landry, at least until he fell off their map for ten years.

Landry hated that all this time later, the mere sound of Tyra's voice could still stir a dozen chords within him, from irritation to regret to anger to desire, and that most haunting note at all, that indescribable longing, that restless dissatisfaction, that sense that there was something good just beyond his grasp, something that would never come to him.

"What do you want?" he asked her last night. "I'm not going to try again."

"I know."

"So did you just call to say fuck you or what?"

"I called to say I'm sorry." She then went on to give him an entire speech, an apology for all the ways she'd hurt him over the years. It was really beautifully crafted. Not surprising, considering that last year she won a Faulkner Prize for Literature for her third novel. She published her first novel two years after their post-divorce hook-up in New York, so maybe she was right after all. Maybe he would have held her back. Maybe domesticity just isn't adequate fuel for prize-winning literature.

He's read all her books. Dark shit, full of ghosts and shadows, hope and despair, seeking and not finding. The kind of stuff people who give out literary awards lap up.

He tried not to be moved by her apology, but he was. It was sincere and raw in a way that reminded him of that college admission essay she'd written oh so many years ago, in another life time, when he was another man. A boy, really.

"So what's this?" he asked when she was done with her speech. "Part of your twelve step program?"

"Something like that," she said.

"You joined a cult? You're working out your salvation?"

"No, Landry, I didn't join a cult. But maybe I am trying to work out my salvation, instead of just sitting at the keyboard and opening up a vein. I'm running out of veins."

"No more award-winning novels in the pipeline?"

"I don't think so." She was quiet for a while. He thought maybe she'd hung up. But then she said, "I was grieving too. You weren't the only one who experienced Carter's death. You weren't the only one who loved him, who had hopes for the future. You weren't the only one, Landry. I was grieving too. But you never noticed, did you?"

When he hung up, he was shaking, and he didn't know with what emotion. He poured himself three fingers of bourbon. At least, he started with three.

"Siri, flush," Landry says now, and the water in the toilet is noisesly sucked down. He misses the loud woosh of his youth. There was something satisfying about the sound of a toilet flushing. The present near silence seems like a metaphor for his current life somehow.

He makes his way to the living room and slumps on the zebra-striped couch. He saw it in the store and thought how much it would piss off Tyra if he had brought something like that home when they were married, so he bought it, because even years later, even after a dozen girlfriends (he's not sure if they all really _count_ as girlfriends), the memory of Tyra still drives him in ways he can't comprehend.

"What's up?" he asks. He hopes Matt will invite him over for dinner. Since renewing his friendship with Matt and Julie, he's sometimes gotten the impression that they find him cloying, so he's backed off on inviting himself to hang out with them too often. They love him, he's sure, but they don't always want him around. Sometimes they like to do old married couple shit together. And apparently the happily monogamous Matt Saracen is still getting laid from time to time.

"I need someone I can trust to watch this baby while I'm teaching my art classes," Matt says. "It would only be four hours a day, Monday through Friday, max. You'll just have to get cleared by the social worker. Drug screening, background check, interview."

"Baby?" Landry asks. "What baby?"


	6. Damage Control

**Chapter Six**

Coach Taylor steps back and shakes his head. How could anyone think…he's sixty-five. He's been married forty-five years. He has two daughters older than that grad school cheerleader. Hell, he has two _granddaughters_ who are _almost_ as old as that girl. "How long has this been up on the Internet?" he asks the coaches.

"About an hour," John answers. "The administration is working on getting it pulled down, but…you know…once something is out there…"

Eric walks away from the coaches and paces down the field, away from everyone. He's got to call Tami and explain before she sees it. He prays to God she hasn't.

His wife started acting kind of weird after that "Sexiest Men Over Sixty" article came out. Tami did what he expected at first – poked fun at him. But then she started exercising every single morning, instead of her three times a week. She started talking about dying her hair again, after deliberately having let it gray naturally for years. He caught her one time looking in the mirror, sliding her fingertips over the light wrinkles under her eyes.

"You're beautiful," he said from behind her. She sighed and let her hands fall to the side, and he wrapped his arms around her from behind, but she said, "You've always had such a baby face, Eric. Except for all that silver-gray hair, you still don't look a day older than forty-six."

It shocked him, her sudden insecurity, after so many decades of firm self-confidence, after all the times she'd poked fun at his own minor jealousies. Maybe it had been coming on gradually, this self-doubt, and he'd been too damn busy as head coach of the number one college team to notice it. "I love you," he said, looking at their joint reflection in the mirror. "You're beautiful inside and out. You've given me more blessings that I could ever count. I don't know what I'd do without you."

He paces now while the phone rings. It goes to her voice mail. "I gotta talk to you. Call me right away." He hits end call. He still has one of the old iPhone8T's instead of an iEverything. All of the other coach's make fun of him for it, but he doesn't need all that extra nonsense.

As he's about to slip the phone back in his jacket pocket, it rings. When he answers, Gracie doesn't even give him a chance to say hello. "What the fuck, Dad? You know I'm up for appointment to the North American Union Council. Only three Congressmen in the entire U.S. get that nomination. This cheerleader sex scandal could completely tank my confirmation hearing."

"I didn't do it."

"I know you didn't, but appearance is everything. I've already got a herd of reporters lined up outside my office. Capitol police can't beat them back. You've got to clean this shit up!"

"Gracie, I don't care for your language."

"I don't give a fuck what you _care_ for. We're not having tea with the queen right now. Listen, I keep a tight rein on my people. I don't see why you can't keep a rein on yours."

"My people?"

"This scandal could destroy everything I've worked the past three years to build. I may be the strongest voice on that Council in favor of an independent currency. If I don't get on there, it's quite possible they'll be paying your salary in inflated NAU dollars two years from now, assuming you still _have_ a job."

"Gracie, damnit, I didn't– "

"I know you didn't. I know you never would. That age difference is so vast it's sick. Not to mention that it would be adultery. But what happened? Who's in those pictures, if not you?"

He explains.

"You've got to get Coach Swainson to come forward," she says, "publicly clear you."

"Trust me, I intend to try, but - "

"- You want me to send my people to talk to him?"

He's not sure who her people are. Or how they define _talking_. "Nah. I'll handle it."

"Just don't kill him before you get him to make a public statement clearing you. And if you don't clean this shit up, I'll have to."

"Damn, Gracie, do you swear like this on the floor of the House?"

"Can we not argue for once, Dad? I don't have time for some faux war with you. You know I'm a little busy trying to get our boys home from a _real_ war. One we shouldn't even be involved in."

"Well who the hell else is going to stop Golden Dawn?"

"I don't mind arming the rebels in Greece, but we shouldn't be sending our young men and women overseas. Why is it our responsibility to defend Istanbul? Let the Turks handle it. They're not much better these days. "

"You know Golden Dawn isn't going to stop at Turkey, Gracie. Not unless we stop them."

"Yeah? If you're so committed to this war, why don't you encourage all your players to sign up?"

"Some of them have. I had a hard time recruiting for this season." Of course, so have the other college teams, so he's not at any relative disadvantage.

"I didn't call to argue about the war. You need to fix this mess before it becomes a big enough scandal to topple my career. Not to mention your marriage. How's Mom taking it? She knows it's not you, right?"

"I don't know how she's taking it. She didn't answer my call. But I can't believe she'd ever believe…" He sighs.

"Dad," Gracie says, her voice suddenly soft. She was like that even as a kid – all full of passion and rage at the injustice of her world (an unwanted time out, a denied second dessert), and then suddenly gentle. "I'm sorry you're going through all this. This has to suck for you. And it's probably going to suck for weeks to come. Hang in there."

"Thanks, Congresswoman." He gazes out over the field, where his assistant coaches are trying to run a chaotic, distracted practice. "I love you too."


	7. Searching

**Chapter Seven**

Landry doesn't even bother to knock when he arrives at Matt's condo in the District. He just walks in and plops a bottle of wine down on the coffee table, next to the pacifier. "For you and Julie to enjoy later."

"How much was that one?" Matt asks as he pulls a nearly empty bottle of formula from the baby's mouth and wedges it between the couch cushions.

Landry slides down into the arm chair. "I don't know. $95. $105 maybe. "

"So, table wine for you then?" Matt drapes a burp cloth over his shoulder.

"How's second fatherhood treating you?"

"A'ight," Matt says. "Fine."

"How long do you have custody for?"

Matt tells him that it's indefinite and that if no one steps up, he and Julie will have to decide whether or not to adopt the child, whom they currently call, simply, "Baby Boy." He puts Baby Boy back against his chest and rubs his back until the child burps.

It took Landry two days to figure that one out with Carter, that you don't really need to pat the baby's back, that you can work out a nice burp with a slow rub. Odd, that he still remembers that sixteen years later. He watches the baby and feels a lump in his throat that he can't quite swallow down. He's not sure if he can do this. Be a babysitter. He's forty-four. He's never been a father, except for those five short days. Children aren't supposed to be a part of his life. He wasn't even around to be a godfather to Anne and Lori, not from age five to fifteen, anyway. But he wants to help out his best friend. Because…shit, just be honest. Life can be pretty damn lonely. "So I have to piss in a cup for the pleasure of letting this bundle of joy spit up on me four hours a day?"

"Yep," Matt says. "You'll pass, right?"

"Of course. I'm not _really_ a rock star, you know." He cocks his head and smiles at the baby. There's a pain in his gut, a bitterness and sweetness all jumbled up inside. He reaches out his arms. "Hey, little minion. Come to Uncle Landry."

**/FNL/**

When Dr. Tami Taylor first gets news of the story, which is all over the UT campus within an hour of the first posting, she puts up a sign on her office door – "Office Hours Cancelled Today," and walks at a fast pace, head bent to the ground, to the rent-free faculty housing that is part of her benefits package. She usually holds her head high and takes in the beauty of the campus, but today she thinks all she'll see is people looking at her.

When she gets inside, she grabs a bottle of Merlot from the built in wine rack below the high kitchen cabinets, heads to the living room, and sits on the black leather couch. They downsized when they moved from Philadelphia, and it was odd getting rid of half of what they owned, but Eric said it would be less for the girls to bother with when they died. The commute from faculty housing is hard to beat—they both walk or take the campus bus. Her contract specifies they can rent the townhouse, at a guaranteed rate, when she retires, though they pay nothing now.

They chose a house with the master bedroom, kitchen, living room, and washer and dryer all on the first floor, so if they ever get too old to make it up those stairs ("I'll just die first," Eric said), they'll have everything they need on one floor. The truth is, they don't even go upstairs now, not often anyway. There's a guest suite upstairs, a small study, and a landing with a library, but Tami's usually got her laptop at the kitchen table, and Eric works from his recliner. They'll wander upstairs when they need a book, but they never stay upstairs to read.

"Siri," Tami says, "search images for Coach Eric Taylor and cheerleader."

They've coated the surface of the wall across from the couch with that special paint that ensures good definition for projection. "Scroll through images. Two second intervals."

As images flash one by one on the wall, Dillon, their chocolate labrador, jumps up on the couch and lays his head in her lap. Tami finally broke down and let Eric get a dog after Gracie went away to college. She expected him to bring home some big, hulking thing, but instead, he crawled into the bed where she was napping and pressed a puppy's nose against hers. Now Dillon is getting on in dog years. He probably doesn't have much time left, but Tami lies to herself that he'll live forever, because she doesn't want to think about saying goodbye to her last baby. She wonders why she resisted Eric's desire for a dog for so long, because no human being could give her the kind of unconditional love Dillon has. As if reading her thoughts, Dillon licks the back of her hand.

"Stop," she says, and the current image freezes on the wall.

Dillon whimpers. "I was talking to Siri, not you." She scratches him behind the ears.

"Not Siri? Dr. Taylor, I do not understand your command," Siri says.

"Zoom in on the image, Siri," she says, and the photo transforms. "Stop." Now it's too blurry. "Back Out. Stop." Tami studies the photo and examines the hair that falls just below the cap, and sees there are no flecks of gray. Eric's still got some black hair on his head, mostly in the back, but it's not _that_ black, and she should be able to see the silver spilling out of the cap. Besides, that neck is too narrow to be Eric's, and those shoulders aren't broad enough. She doesn't know who this man is, but it's not Eric. She sighs, tells Siri to shut off the images, and leans forward to pluck her wine glass off the coffee table. Dillon whimpers, jumps off the couch, and heads to the kitchen in search of his food dish.

Tami listened to Eric's message on her drive home, but she hasn't felt like calling him back. She knew it couldn't be him, but the fact that others think it might, that the whole country might soon think her husband is capable of bending some cute young thing over his desk, is, frankly, _humiliating_.

Tami Taylor might have had self-esteem issues as a teenager, but she's been rather sure of herself for a very long time, and for most of her marriage, she's been confident of her place in it. In the last ten years, however, she's felt a kind of subtle power shift rolling the solid ground beneath her feet, and she hasn't liked it.

It's nothing Eric's _done. _He's been the same faithful husband he's always been. Sure their libidos have slown down, and maybe they've drifted into separate spheres more as they've gotten older and their kids have grown and they've both thrown themselves into time-consuming careers, but he still tells her he loves her every day. He still compliments her in sincere ways that make her heart spasm just a little. He still makes time on Sundays to split a bottle of wine and cuddle on the couch and listen to her talk about her week. He still wants to fool around on occasion, and he still calls it "fooling around" too. But while society thinks his silver-gray mane makes him look distinguished, on her it's just a symbol of growing old. She knows she's more attractive than your average sixty-five-year-old woman, but he's aged even more gracefully than she has. And that damn article. Number two sexiest man over sixty. Number two. In the _entire_ country.

"You ought to be proud," he joked when it came out. "You can wear me around to the faculty parties. Like a trophy."

And she was proud…sort of….but for the past few years, even before the article came out, she's been aware of female professors as young as thirty-five noticing him. Women have always noticed him, of course, but not as often as men have noticed her. Maybe it's his reserved personality, or the fact that as a football coach he spends most of his time around other men, but he hasn't been the object of any obvious romantic advances. Tami, on the other hand, has in the course of their marriage received three entirely unsolicited kisses.

That first one from Glenn, Eric more or less laughed off. But he happened to walk in to her Braemore office twenty years ago just as Dr. Tate was pulling a similar move, and Eric belted the guy, broke his nose, and got arrested for assault. With the help of a good lawyer, the charges were dismissed, but the incident stuck with Tami, and when another man put the moves on her five years later, she declined to inform her husband. And now she wonders how many advances Eric has declined to inform her of in order to spare not her fists, but her feelings.

"Is it wrong," she muses out loud, "just to want a little power over a man?"

"Siri does not understand Dr. Taylor."

_Who does?_ Tami thinks. _Who does?_


	8. Catching Flies

**Chapter Eight**

Tyra Collette slides onto a bar stool next to her literary agent, who pours her a glass of wine from an already ordered bottle. "Did you get my rights back from Braemark Publishing?" Tyra asks.

Tyra got a raw deal on her first novel, because she didn't know what she was doing back then. She submitted directly to a small press on her own – no agent – and she was just thrilled to get a contract. Now, five books later, she wants to bring out her first novel again under a better royalty arrangement with her current publisher, who will actually promote the damn thing.

Lyla Garrity tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear. "Taken care of," she says, and raises her wine glass to Tyra. Tyra clinks Lyla's glass with her own.

After graduating from Vanderbilt, Lyla went on to earn an M.B.A. from Yale. She worked in the corporate world for two years but hated it. Everyone assumed she would marry a doctor or lawyer or CEO, but she married a comic book author, a fact for which Buddy, Jr. still ridicules her. From her husband, Lyla learned about the publishing industry, and decided she could better apply her business acumen there.

Tyra got an agent after that first novel, a tall, dark, and handsome NYU graduate with a sexy British accent. She ran into Lyla at cocktail party in New York while she was in the process of writing her third novel. After a long conversation with Lyla, who had been in the business for only three years at that point, Tyra dumped her agent, both from her payroll and from her bed, and signed up with Garrity instead. It was the right choice, because that novel might never have won the Faulkner Prize for Literature otherwise. It wasn't that Trya's book wasn't good enough, it was just that if Lyla hadn't been such a charming advocate, it might never have gotten adequately reviewed and come to the attention of the judges.

"Just like that?" Tyra asks.

Lyla smiles sweetly. "You just have to know how to talk to them."

Tyra's dark red lips curl. She likes the new color of her lipstick, because it works with the short, jet black hair she's chosen for the time being. Next year, she's going to try blonde again. It's been awhile. "Garrity, I bet you and Grace Taylor could take over the world if you teamed up." Tyra was the one who was supposed to go into politics. That had been the vision she'd shared with Tim, after all. Small scale stuff. Local. Make a change. But then she'd taken her first creative writing class her senior year of college, just to fill a general writing requirement she'd forgotten about, and she'd discovered not only that she could actually write, but that it felt damn good to do it.

"Well publishing _is_ a lot like politics," Lyla concedes, "but I don't have Grace's talent for raising a storm of rhetoric and then subduing my enemy into stunned silence."

"No," Tyra agrees. "You always smile pleasantly and talk gently and feel your enemy's pain while you're slitting his throat. I use to hate that about you. But now I see the virtue in it. I suppose you catch more flies with your honey than Grace Taylor does with her vinegar."

"Well, Grace Taylor isn't trying to catch flies. She's just trying to rapidly drown them."

Tyra laughs. Lyla fingers the stem of her wine glass and asks, "Why won't you let me represent your latest novel? You can't seriously want to just let it rot in a drawer."

Tyra has written a book about a woman who, after losing her eight-year-old child in a car accident, blames her drunk-driving husband and eventually kills him, only to regret the murder and undergo a deep spiritual change which culminates in a sort of enlightenment – too late – moments before her death row execution. "It's too personal."

"All your books are personal," Lyla replies. "Writing is how you work out your demons, isn't it?"

"This one is different," Tyra says. "It got me to thinking…about Landry. It got me to thinking again…maybe I shouldn't have murdered our marriage."

"Well, didn't you attempt a reconciliation years ago? And he said no. That's on him. It's not as though you didn't try."

"Yeah. But maybe I didn't try hard enough. I mean, I just threw it out there. _Let's try again._ I half assumed he'd just come back when I snapped my fingers. Because most of our lives, he has. Maybe I shouldn't have approached him like that. Maybe I actually have to…woo him."

Lyla lets out a great laugh. "Sorry," she says, covering her mouth. "I'm trying to imagine you _wooing_ anyone."

"I called him yesterday. Said my sorrys. And I meant them. But I also pointed out to him where he failed me. So, yeah, I guess I'm not so good at this whole wooing thing." She sighs.

"Love is hard. Sometimes you regret the one you let go. But…you love the one your with."

"Regrets?" Tyra raises an eyebrow. "Tim?"

"Tim," Lyla says. "But Jason too. Jason was my first love. We were…kids in love, kids unspoiled by the world. I don't know if it's the love or the innocence I regret."

"I don't think I ever had any innocence."

"But you do know what I mean, in a way, don't you? You never love again like you loved when you were a teenager, do you?"

"You never do anything again like you did when you were a teenager," Tyra says. "You never _feel_ that _deeply_ again. You get perspective. You get the long-angled lens, eventually. Thank God, too, or you'd never make it through a lifetime."

Lyla shakes her head. "Don't tell me you don't _feel_ big anymore. I've read your books. But you're right. You've got perspective now. You know if Landry never comes around, time marches on. The past…it gets to be a smaller and smaller part of your life. Even if it never leaves your heart, it at least retreats to a corner. Gives you some peace."

Tyra nods. "I think we're going to need another bottle of wine."


	9. Left Standing

**Chapter Nine**

When Matt retreats to the kitchen to start cooking dinner, Landry tucks Baby Boy under his arm like a football, making sure to support the neck. He remembers that admonition from when Carter was born all those years ago. Support the neck. And don't shake the baby. He remembers the nurse telling them that, as if they ever would.

"Don't kill your son!" Tyra said when the nurse had retreated from the room. "Just so you know. In case you weren't aware that was a new parental rule." And Landry had made it a running joke, every day of the next five days, the one in the hospital, and the four at home, walking around, shouting, "Don't shake the baby!"

Except Carter _had_ died. They hadn't killed him. He had just died one night, in his sleep, during a rare hour of parental slumber. SIDS, they called it, which, as far as Landry was concerned, meant So I Donnaknow, Son. I don't know why you had to die.

When he hears the muffled ring tone sounding from his pocket, he says, "Siri, answer. Speaker." It's Tyra, but she has a little trouble hearing him through his pants pocket, so he has to do a little maneuvering with the baby to dig out the iEverything and lay it on the coffee table. The photo that has popped up with the identification "Tyra C. " (how convenient that he never had to change the initial when she changed her name back) is years old, form the last time they hooked up, in New York. He has no idea what she looks like now. Well, that's not quite true. He's read her Wikipedia bio. It has a more recent photo. Her hair is long and red, unless she's died and cut it again.

Baby Boy coos and sputters.

"What's that?" Tyra asks.

"A baby," Landry answers.

"You're…you're a father now? I had no idea. Are you _married_?" She sounds alarmed. "I mean, I know we haven't spoken in years - "

"- Actually, you just called me last night -"

"- Before that, genius. But you're a dad?"

"No. It's Matt and Julie's."

"I just talked to Julie last month. She didn't even say she was pregnant!"

Landry explains the baby in the fruit crate, the foster parenting, and his new part-time babysitting gig.

Apparently, the missasumption has made it occur to Tyra that Landry might actually be taken, even if he's not a married father, because she asks, "Is there someone in your life right now?"

"Oh, there are _lots_ of someones." Mrs. Taylor was right all those years ago, when she'd told him he'd one day have a career that he loved and women falling all over him. What she hadn't told him was that he wouldn't really want any of those women, not for long anyway, or that the career he loved simply wouldn't be _enough_ to love. "But I'm not in an exclusive relationship, if that's what you're asking. Not that it matters. We're not getting back together again. As I already told you. Twice. That's _never_ happening."

Tyra has left him standing alone twice in their lives. Three times if you count the morning after that one-night, post-divorce stand in New York. Damned if he's going to let her do it a fourth time.

"I'm not trying to get back together. But I _am_ trying to be friends again. To find some peace. Because I'm forty-five, Landry. And life isn't as long as I once thought it was." Landry is silent. "Have you thought about what I said last night? I was hoping you might accept my apology. And acknowledge…" She doesn't say what she wants him to acknowledge, but he knows: his part in the crumbling of the marriage. Because it's never all one's person's fault. That's what they say anyway, whoever _they_ are, like a mantra, like they know, like they were _there_ – it's never all one person's fault. When you're shoved in a ditch, it's never _all_ one's person fault, you know. Listen, you with mud on your face, lying on the ground - you could have been a different person. You could have been the kind of person your assailant wouldn't _want_ to shove in a ditch. You could have _seen_ the push coming. You could have shored up your footing. So get up out of the dirt where you're lying stunned and sprawled and _own your part_.

"Have you thought about it?" she asks again.

Has the _thought_ about it? All night long. Shot after bourbon shot. And all afternoon long, too. Minute after creeping minute. He's thought about how he shut down after Carter died, how it felt as if a light had gone off, how he wondered if Tyra was secretly relieved, since she hadn't wanted the baby, not at first anyway. He remembers that one night, a month later, when he heard her sobbing, lying in the bed on her side next to him at one in the morning, just sobbing, and he pretended to be asleep, because he thought there was nothing he could do to make it better. He remembers the things she said, the things _he_ said, when the fights began later – all the words shot like so much scattered shrapnel that can never be dug out of the heart.

He remembers every wound they gave each other. "Haven't really had a chance," he says. "I gotta go change this baby. _Siri, end call_."

The iEverything goes black, and Landry slides the baby outward in front of himself and looks into his little brown face. He lifts the baby and sniffs its diaper and winces. Baby Boy is probably two months old, from the estimates of the pediatrician Matt had examine him today, and he's being fed formula. Tyra breast fed. Carter never smelled like that. Baby poop doesn't really smell much at first, in the early days.

Imagine that, Landry thinks. It's a broken, aching, screwed up world of people making bad choices and hurting each other every day, but his son died before even his shit began to stink. Lucky Carter, in a way.


	10. Confrontation

**Chapter Ten**

Coach Taylor can't concentrate on practice. His fellow coaches know he's not the man in the photos, but maybe his players don't. Whether they do or not, they keep shooting distracted glances at him and messing up the plays. Coach Taylor is distracted himself, wondering why his wife hasn't returned his call, if she believes the news. He leaves practice in the hands of his assistants and takes off to Tami's office. He sees the "Office Hours Canceled Today" sign and feels the eyes of every passing student on his back as he walks down the hall.

His next stop is the on-campus apartment complex of Coach Coojoy Swainson. When he clambers up the interior stairs and pounds on the door, there's no answer. "Open up!" he shouts. "Swainson! I know you're in there. Your car's out front." He pounds until the man finally flings open the door. Coach Taylor pushes his way.

Coach Swainson has a half empty bottle of scotch on the coffee table in the living room that is a stone's throw from the doorway. The apartment is an efficiency, because Swainson has a mortgage on a house back home in Dallas. Swainson is holding a piece of paper in his hands. "Listen, Eric – "

Coach Taylor steps up until he's in the man's face. "You're going to go public and clear me."

Swainson steps back and hands him the paper. "That's my resignation letter."

Coach Taylor's darkened eyes rake over the letter. "Well this is all well and good except it doesn't say _why_ you're _really_ resigning."

"I can't….Look, I'll walk away. But I can't admit it was me. I have a fiancé back in Dallas!"

"And I have wife! Here. At UT."

"Privately, she'll believe you if you say you didn't do it. But my fiancé – "

"Maybe you should have thought of her reaction _before_ you screwed some other woman in my office."

"It was a temporary lapse in judgment. That girlcame onto _me_. And I know I shouldn't have, but everyone makes mistakes – "

" – A _mistake_ is when you forget to carry the two in addition. It's not when you cheat on the woman you're engaged to, ruin another man's reputation, and put the entire team at risk of scandal."

The scent of scotch is strong on Swainson's breath. "I've resigned." The letter says only that he's found the job too time consuming and that he wants to return to his fiancé in Dallas to build a family there. "I'll be gone back to Dallas tomorrow morning. This will blow over eventually for you. You can try to pin it on me if you want, but it's just going to look like your defending yourself and that you forced me to resign in order to be the fall guy. Because it looks enough like you in those photos. And everyone knows it's your office. Hell, your wife's photo is on the desk."

Coach Taylor is gripping the resignation letter so tightly that it begins to crumple. If he doesn't step outside, he's going to hurt this man, or at least _try_ to. Swainson's over thirty years younger than he is. He drops the letter, marches out into the apartment, slams the door, paces in the hallway, and then puts his fist through the drywall in the hall. He mutters as he pulls his hand out of the hole and then looks left and right to make sure no one is around to see what he's just done.

He leans back against the wall and calls his youngest daughter.

"You fix this yet?" Gracie asks. "Because I have a press conference scheduled in half an hour. I was _supposed_ to be talking about the North American Union."

He tells her about his conversation with Swainson.

"Here's what you do, Dad. You go back in there, and you tell him you have photographs. Fare more explicit photographs that show everything, including his face. You tell him the UT administration managed to get those suppressed, but that if he doesn't hold a press conference and publically admit what he's done, you'll release them to the media. I'm sure he'd rather confess with words than pictures. He's not going to want his fiancé to _see_ the details. That way he can still lie to her and say you made him the fall guy."

"What if he doesn't believe the photos exist?"

"I can always have my people doctor something up."

"Is this what politics has done to you, Gracie?"

"I walk close to the line, but I don't cross it. I do what I have to do, but I don't ever violate _my_ principles. Lying to a liar to get him to tell the truth, to save my father's reputation – that isn't wrong in my book. But I don't make dirty deals, and I don't take bribes. I've even introduced a bill to reduce Congressional salaries three – "

"- I was joking, Gracie Belle."

"You were _half_ joking. The other half of you was expressing your disappointment in me."

Coach Taylor's jaw tightens. He tries to tell her it's not true, that he's not disappointed in her, that he's damn proud of her, even when he doesn't agree with her, even when he thinks her hard edges could use a softening, but she speaks before he can: "I also don't trade votes for legislation, because I don't compromise."

"Well, yeah, you always were an obstinate thing." It's not _what_ he means to say, but he says it softly, nostalgically. His tone says what he means to say, even if his words don't.

"Was _obstinate_ on your word-a-day calendar today?" Her voice is affectionate, teasing. It's not often he hears that these days. Of course, it's not often they talk. They live in different worlds and have for years.

"That and indefatigable," he says. "Right next to a picture of you."

"Take my advice on this one, Dad. Use the threat of photos. You're going to get through this. It'll be rough for a week or two even after he goes public, but then the next media sex sensation will come along. Trust me. You'll survive."

"I love you, too," he says, and hangs up the phone. He shoves it back in his jacket pocket, straightens his cap, takes a deep breath, and strides back to Coach Swainson's door.


	11. Meeting the Press

**Chapter Eleven**

"Well aren't you fancy," Landry says as Matt adds decorative garnish to the dinner plates that are resting on the kitchen counter. Julie is home early from work (she usually doesn't roll in until after seven) and is snuggling with the baby on the living room couch, heels kicked off.

Matt has turned cooking into an art form, and Julie's told him more than once that he should open his own restaurant. The problem is, the food _looks_ better than it tastes. Not that Julie complains; it's all quite edible, and as long as she doesn't have to cook after a day at work, she's content.

"Put these on the table, smart ass."

Landry grabs two plates and brings them to the adjoining dining room. There's no eat-in kitchen here.

"I meant the coffee table," Matt tells him. "We never eat there." They used to eat in the dining room, when the twins were with them. Julie grew up with family dinners, and she insisted religiously on them. But once Lori went off to travel Europe and Anne went to her first year of college, they stopped. The table felt so empty. The TV became their permanent dinner guest. (Everyone still calls it "T.V." even though the technology has changed. There are no screens, really, just projection on any receptive spot, and all programming now comes through the Internet.)

Julie gets up to lay the sleepy baby in the bassinet Matt borrowed from a neighbor yesterday, sits next to Matt on the couch, and turns on the evening news. Landry takes the arm chair and rests his plate on his lap. Matt leans forward and pours the wine Landry brought into three glasses.

"You're going to spoil my taste for cheaper bottles," Julie says.

Landry raises a glass to her. "It's my job, as your faithful friend, to refine your tastes."

She half salutes him, but stops, puts her glass on the table, and says, "Siri, turn up the volume."

Gracie is on the television, at a podium, standing in front of a sea of reporters. Words like "father," "scandal," "disgusting," "sex," and "abuse of power" rise to the surface as they shout out their questions. Gracie's press secretary calls for silence.

Landry hasn't seen Gracie in person since she was about seven. Every time he sees her on T.V., he marvels at the fact that she's a grown woman. She's already one year from the big 3-0. He also marvels at how beautiful she is, because truth be told – he knows you're supposed to say all baby's are cute – but he always thought she was a little bug-eyed and weird-headed as a baby, and as a toddler she had such disorganized hair. The last time he saw her in person, he was 160% older than her. Now he's only 50% older than her. In another ten years, he'll be 38% older than her. Weird, what time does. ("Even weirder," Tyra would say, "how your freakish mind breaks it into precentages.")

Landry wasn't a citizen of Virginia when Gracie was elected as a Congresswoman, but he probably wouldn't have voted for her even if he was. She went to the University of Virginia for an accelerated degree program and earned a dual B.A. in Economics and Political Science and her M.A. in Economics in just four years. She stayed on in Charlottesville after she graduated, involved herself heavily in local and state politics, and was elected to the United States Congress at the young age of twenty-six. She's articulate and passionate about her political goals, smart as the proverbial whip, and one of those rare politicians you can't help but admire because she's actually _consistent_ in pursuit of her principles, but she's too radical. She wants to withdraw completely from the NAU, remove the U.S. abruptly from the war with Greece, and supply the U.S. labor shortage by eliminating _all_ immigration quotas and letting in anyone who passes a criminal background check and a health screening. She also wants to repeal the 28th and force all amendments passed since to go through the old ratification procedure.

"I originally agreed to attend this press conference today in order to discuss the assault on our sovereignty being perpetrated by the North American Union," Grace Taylor announces, "and to explain why a common currency shared by Mexico, Canada, the United States of America, and half of Central America would result in rampant inflation and a crippling economic uncertainty that would far surpass any problems we are currently experiencing from our labor shortage. But I know none of y'all are here today to talk about such trivial matters as true freedom and our economic future." (Gracie never could shake that y'all; she inherited it from her mom and dad and only had it reinforced in southern Virginia.) "Y'all are here today to ask me about – what else? Sex."

"What?" Matt and Landry say in unison. Julie puts her wine glass down on the table.

"Sex," Gracie says again, "is the national pastime, the national obsession, the only thing worth spilling ink over." It's a quaint expression, given how rarely ink is used these days. "Why spill ink over our young men and women who are spilling their blood in a foreign country to defend one group of fascists against another? Why spill ink over the incremental fascism that is creeping its way into our own country through the North American Union and a fickle Congress increasingly unrestrained by any semblance of republican government? Why spill ink over the economic problems that have resulted from a precipitous population decline and that threaten to boil over from a cauldron of government malinvestment? Why do any of that, when we can talk about a sex scandal?"

"What the hell is she talking about?" Julie asks.

"Got me," Matt mutters. The news hit national television in the early evening, but Landry and Matt didn't have the TV on and Julie was hauled up in her office with a mountain of e-paperwork before driving home listening only to music.

"Y'all are here to talk about the false allegations against my father," Gracie continues.

"What?" Julie leaps for the iEverything she has lain at the edge of the table. The holographic keyboard appears and she begins searching for news. "Oh my God," she mutters.

"What?" Matt asks anxiously.

"Oh my God," she says again.

"What?" Landry asks.

She hands the iEverything first to Matt, who numbly passes it to Landry as Gracie says, "The man in those photographs is not my father, and it is absurd to think otherwise. It is my hope that the man who is _actually_ in those photographs will come forward to clear my father's reputation, that he will immediately resign, and that the media will grow the fuck up. I will not be taking questions." Gracie Taylor turns and departs the stage.

Julie and Matt stare straight ahead at her departing back while Landry chuckles low and long. When he stops laughing, he asks, "Julie, did your baby sister just say fuck at a national press conference?"

The podium is empty for a moment until a man in a military dress uniform assumes it. His press secretary says, "The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has an announcement for the press."

"Operation Trojan Horse has been successful," the Vice Chairman says. "As of midnight last night, Golden Dawn has retreated from Istanbul. However, ten minutes ago they began bombing in southern Italy. Golden Dawn sleeper cells within Rome have simultaneously engaged in dozens of terrorist attacks. We can no longer afford to deny the extent of the war in which we are engaged and must _remain_ engaged. Military recruiment had severely declined over the past fifteen years. Our voluntary forces will soon be overextended. The time has come for Congress to discuss the reinstitution of the draft. I will now take questions."

Voices rise like porpoise chirping from the sea of reporters. The press secretary calls on one.

"General Cafferty, it has been reported that in your high school days, you used to play football for Coach Eric Taylor on the Dillon Lions. During your stint on the Lions, did you ever observe Coach Taylor showing an interest in the cheerleaders?"

The camera zooms in on General Luke Cafferty's face. His eyes darken. He says nothing, turns, and walks off the stage.

"Unbelievable," Matt says.

"I know," Julie half shouts. "Who would think my Dad – "

"- No," Matt says. "It's unbelievable how successful all these people from this tiny west Texas town have become. Your Dad, head coach of the number one college team. Your Mom, a renowned research professor. You, maybe about to become provost of Obama U. Landry, rolling in an ocean of cash. Your sister, a Congresswoman. Cafferty, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tyra, a successful novelist. And then there's me. Househusband."

"You're an artist," Julie insists. "And an exceptional one."

"An exceptionally _unknown_ one."

"_And_ a great teacher," Julie avows.

"Part-time."

"And a good husband, and a good father. And now you'll be a good foster father."

Matt sighs and clears his half eaten plate. Landry watches him retreat to the kitchen and asks Julie, "Mid-life crisis?"

"I just hope he doesn't have an affair."

"Matt? Nah. Maybe he'll just take up performance art."


	12. Liking Each Other

******Author's Note:** It's beginning to feel like no one but my beta is reading this, so I'm going to take a hiatus from this piece for a while. I'll be back to continue it later sometime after my spring break, when maybe readers have caught up.

**Chapter Twelve**

Dillon whimpers when he hears Eric yell "Tami!" and slam the front door.

Tami's not sure if it's the dog or the door that wakes her from her unplanned nap. She stirs as Eric walks in and his keys skid across the surface of the coffee table. His Longhorns cap follows, ringing itself around the neck of the bottle she's more or less emptied.

"You drink that whole thing by yourself?" he asks.

"No. I shared it with the tenth sexiest man over sixty. John Cusack. He kind of looks like you in profile, so I got confused."

She can tell Eric doesn't know what to make of this. He hasn't unbuttoned his Longhorn's jacket yet. He's got one hand on one hip.

"That ever happen to you before, hon?" she asks. "People confuse you with someone else?"

He walks cautiously to his recliner and eases down. It's black leather, like the couch, but it's more worn. "You saw the articles? The photos?"

"I sure did."

"It wasn't me."

"I know that, sweetheart."

She sees the tension drain out of him. He lets his head fall back against the chair and sighs, "Thank God." He must have been terrified of her reaction, of possibly _losing_ her. She's still got it, apparently. She smiles.

"What's amusing about this?" he asks with irritation.

"Everything and nothing, sugar. Everything and nothing. Who was it?"

"Coojoy Swainson."

"Oh, yeah, I can see that now that you tell me. Well, at least he's only eight or nine years older than that girl. But he used your office? Because that looked like your desk."

"Yeah."

"He's going to clear you? Straighten this out?"

"I went over to his place after practice. Had a little talk with him."

"Did y'all talk with your fists?"

"I don't think I'd win that dialogue, babe. He's thrity-five years younger than me. Anyway, he already had his resignation letter written when I showed up. But he told me he wasn't planning to fess up that it was him. He'd quit, but he wouldn't come clean. He's got that fiancé back in Dallas and doesn't want to ruin it."

"Well maybe he should have thought of that before he bent that girl over your desk."

"Just what I said. But he still insisted he wasn't going public. So I told him there were other photos, explicit photos, and I'll set them loose if he doesn't hold a press conference and tell the truth. So he agreed he'll do it."

"But there aren't any other photos."

"Nope."

"That's a bit Machiavellian of you, sugar."

"Well, Gracie gave me the idea."

"Ah. Yes. Well. The Congresswoman." She laughs. Then she almost cries. Gracie's always been a sore spot with her. She loves her baby girl, but she doesn't feel close to her, the way she still half does with Julie. "How could she turn out nothing like either one of us?"

"Gracie's got a lot of our qualities, actually," Eric says, "both our flaws and our virtues – but every one of them writ large."

"Too large." Tami sits forward and takes his cap off the neck of the bottle and lays it on the coffee table. "How long do you think this scandal will haunt us?"

"Swainson should be giving the press conference within the next hour. We can watch it if you want."

"God no. I don't want to see all that. But even when he comes clean, the jokes...the looks. How long do you think it will last?"

He shakes his head.

"People really thought it was you! The whole country thought it was you! They all thought you could actually get a twenty-two year old girl to have sex with you." She knows she says it petulantly, and she doesn't like the sound of her own voice. "No one thinks _I_ could get a twenty-two year old to have sex with me."

He comes and sits next to her on the couch and kisses her on the forehead. "What good is a twenty-two year old?" he asks. "Too little discipline. Too little experience." He puts a hand lightly on her breast and lowers his voice to a half-serious, husky tone, "How about a sixty-five year old?"

Despite the recent jumble of negative feelings, she smiles. The familiar warmth and depth and playfulness in his voice makes her feel at peace. "Oh, hon," she says, putting a hand over his and moving it down slightly, "I don't really…well, I guess I could fool around, if you really want to."

"I detect a lack of enthusiasm in your answer."

"I wouldn't mind fooling around. Really."

"Tami, honestly, I don't particularly want to at the moment either. I expected you to say no. I just wanted you to know I still want to."

"Even when you don't want to?"

"Even when I don't want to. That's how amazing you are."

Happiness and tenderness and exhaustion mingle in the sound of her laughter.

"You know what I _do_ feel like doing with my beautiful bride, though?"

"What's that?" she asks.

"I feel like opening another bottle of wine, and getting drunk with you while we watch some mindless old comedy and forget about this media craziness for a couple hours. Whatever you want to watch."

"_Jerry McGuire!_"

"Except that."

Soon, they each have a glass of wine in their hands. (Yes, she's already had most of a bottle, but at sixty-five on a bad day, who's counting?). After Eric shoots down her next three choices of movie, they go truly classic and settle on _The Philadelphia Story_, because she loves Cary Grant ("sexiest man in the grave," she jokes) and knows he's willing to watch anything with Katherine Hepburn. ("What can I say?" Eric reasons. "I have a thing for red heads.")

When Eric puts his feet up on the coffee table, and Tami sits sideways against him with her legs stretched out on the couch, the dog tries to get in between him.

"Shoo!" Eric says. "She's _mine_ you know. _Mine_."

Dillon growls.

"Go on, now, Dillon," Tami tells him. "Go on and curl up at my feet." She points, and the dog obeys, but not without a whimper. "You've got to share Mama."

"Not me," Eric says, tightening his arm her. "All mine."

She snuggles back against him. Another time, she might tease him for his possessiveness. Tonight, she too much likes the sound of it. "That's right," she says. "All yours."

"Forever and ever," he says, his lips against her hair. "Hey," he half whispers, "you know what I like about you?"

"Uh-un," she murmurs.

"I can count on you to be level-headed about things. You are one collected lady. You're my rock. All the things we've been through over the years…I don't know how I'd of gotten through some of them without you by my side. I love you, of course. But what' really great is that I still _like_ you."

She knows what he means. You love your family, even if there are times you can't stand to be around them. So after decades of marriage, anyone can say, "I love you." It's easy to say that, like a needle falling into a groove on a broken record. You don't have to pause to think. The words are as reflexive as breathing. But to say, "I _like_ you"– well, that requires a pause. And to _mean_ it, as he clearly does – that's a rare thing, after forty-five years of familiarity, forty-five years of facing every flaw.

Tami closes her eyes. The pressure of his arm around her is familiar, comforting, and she realizes she doesn't really need the sexual power she possessed in her younger years. She needs precisely what she has - _this_ – this certainty, this trust, this companionship, this marriage of complements. "I like you, too."


	13. Differences

**Chapter Thirteen**

Matt crawls back into bed after feeding Baby Boy. He and Julie decided to turn in early tonight, almost as soon as Landry went out the door.

Julie rolls into his arms. "Can you believe the media? Thank God Coach Swainson gave that press conference. Not that Mom would ever believe…that's so sick. Why would anyone think my dad would do that?"

Matt toys with her hair, running his fingers through the short strands. "Or more to the point that _she_ would do that. I mean, I can see why _he_ would."

"What?"

"I mean, not your dad specifically. I just mean, I could see why a man would _want_ to. I mean, seriously, if only a man could get a hot young chick, most men would."

Julie raises her head and glares at him. There's dim light from the stars and the street coming through the open blinds. "So you would cheat on me with a twenty-two-year-old cheerleader if only you _could_. "

"Nah. That's not what I meant. I didn't mean _cheating_. I was just talking about the age difference. It's sick to you, because you're thinking of it from the perspective of the young woman. And from her perspective…I guess it _is_ kind of sick. But it's not really sick from the perspective of the older man."

"You realize you're doing absolutely nothing to fill this hole you've dug yourself."

"I'll just stop then." His fingertips fall on her tense shoulder. "You know I'd never cheat on you, right?"

"Yeah. I mean…I don't know. They say seventy percent of all married men have cheated at some point in their marriage."

"Well I'm the other thirty percent."

"And I'm the other fifty percent," she says. "Because only fifty percent of married women have cheated. It's horribly skewed."

"Don't tell Gracie."

"I'm sure she knows." Gracie was almost a Women's Study major, but she decided to major in political science and economics instead. A Thanksgiving never passes when Gracie doesn't rail about the fact that the United States has _yet_ to elect a female President. ("They've had female presidents and prime ministers in Muslim countries, for Christ's sake," she complains. "Why can't we get our act together?" And Dad: "Because we're waiting for _you_ to turn 35, Gracie. We're all waiting for _you_ to be the first." Then Mom: "And youngest.")

Julie kisses Matt, and he responds, lazily at first, and then with more fervor. She's a little surprised by his response, because he's spent all day with the baby, and she remembers how draining that was, even when she was in her early twenties. "You _know_," she says, "we never got to have our Saturday night sex. You have any energy left tonight?"

He smiles, his lips crooked and cute and just the way she remembers them from when they first fell in love. "I bet you could wake me up."

She slips a leg between his and slides a hand downward to stroke him through the fabric of his red silk boxers. "I bet I could," she whispers, and a wide grin weaves its way across his features.

**/FNL/**

Gracie Taylor shudders and tosses back her long blonde hair. She lets out a satisfied groan before she pushes the man two steps back from the desk where she's sitting. She stands, pulls her black, silk panties back up, and lowers her skirt. After opening the left hand drawer, she pulls out a pack of cigarettes before sitting again on her desk.

"When are you going to quit that nasty habit?" he asks, jerking his pants back up to his waist.

"I thought you said you like it when I talk dirty."

"The smoking, Congresswoman. The _smoking_."

"When Congress makes it illegal." She lights up. "Which they won't as long as they can tax it." The tip of the cigarette reddens as she sucks in.

He zips and buttons himself and then buckles his belt. "You realize less than five percent of the population smokes now?"

She blows the smoke in his face. "Well I dare to be different."

Coughing, he waves the smoke from the air. He begins buttoning up his open shirt, but not without pausing to admire again the sight revealed by her own open blouse. She chuckles at his gaze, holds the cigarette between her lips, and reclasps her loose bra. Then she takes the cigarette out and removes a speck of tobacco from her tongue before saying, "Check with my outside guy to make sure the coast is clear before you open the door. And if anyone does see you, say we were having a political discussion."

"Yeah. I know the procedure by now. What I don't know is why we don't just go public with our relationship and stop all this sneaking around."

"General, you don't want a scandal any more than I do. I'm already dealing with the fall-out from that mess over my father, despite Coach Swainson's admission."

"What's scandalous about what we're doing?"

"Oh, Lukey." She smirks and shakes her head.

"No, really, what's scandalous about it?" He puts his hands down on the desk on either side of where she's sitting and lowers his head so they're eye to eye. "Becky and I were divorced before I so much as touched your hand. Yeah, I'm a little older than you – "

"- A decade and change – "

" - But what's that after thirty?"

"Well, I'm not _quite_ thirty yet."

"It's common enough, our age difference. Especially _these_ days." Gracie knows what he means. The decline in military recruitment, the labor shortage, the ballooning federal deficit, the devaluing of the currency– it's all exacerbated by the demographic shift. The baby boomers are dying off. People have been getting married later, if at all. More and more people have been choosing not to have children, or to have just one. It's not at all uncommon for couples to have a twelve or fifteen year age gap. There are simply more men and women in Luke's generation. "So what's the problem?" he asks. "Where's the scandal?"

She puts a hand on his cheek, strokes the flesh slowly and gently, and then suddenly smacks him. "Smarten up," she says.

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek. "That's only hot when we're fucking."

She rubs the spot she smacked, kisses it, and then whispers, low and annoyed, "You want to reinstitute the draft. I want to end the war. And you don't get why I don't want to go public with our relationship?"

He stands up straight and steps back from the desk. "People respect each other and disagree all the time."

"Listen, if people knew I was with you, it would undermine my position. We're not going public."

He walks a few steps to reclaim the hat she threw on the floor earlier and positions it on his head. It looks strange with just the shirt, without the medal-strewn jacket that he draped on the back of the chair across from her desk. "Then we're not going anywhere." He strides to the chair and grabs his jacket.

She stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray, slides off the desk, and approaches him, her pale silk blouse still open over the black, lacy bra. "What does that mean? You didn't think we were getting married next week, did you?"

He shrugs into his jacket. "It means I'm done, Gracie. With this. Whatever this is."

Luke walks past her. He steps over her high heels on the way to her office door. She follows him and asks, "_What_?"

He whirls around. "You heard me."

"Lukey, come on now…" She reaches for him, but he grabs her wrist with a quick snap before she can touch him. His fingers clamp down hard around it, and he flings her hand away.

"Like you said, that's only sexy when – "

" - None of this is sexy anymore, Gracie. I'm a grown man. I've already been divorced by one child. I don't know why I went straight into the bed of another."

"To prove you could I guess," she says bitterly.

"What does that mean?"

"You still love Becky. She left you for an older man – "

" – Older? Four years, max - "

" - so you went for a younger woman. She left you for a guy who's content with nothing but a chunk of land in Texas and a cold six-pack, so you went for a woman who won't be content until she has the White House. To show Becky you want the opposite of everything she wants. Only now you can't show her, because I won't go public. That's what _really_ irks you."

He swallows and says nothing.

"Yeah," she says. "I got your number, don't I?" She closes her blouse tightly over her chest, and holds it wrapped together. She can't button it, because at least two of the buttons popped off when he was tearing at it earlier. She always keeps a spare change of clothes in her office, so it won't be a problem to change later. "I don't think you've ever considered that I could actually love you, if only you loved me."

"You've never loved anyone, Gracie. You love abstract political and economic ideals. Principles. Theories. Systems. But not individuals."

Now she's the one to say nothing.

Luke lets himself out.


	14. Home

**Chapter Fourteen**

Becky snuggles in as the sun sets over the horizon. Tim sits with her on the porch swing, his arm draped around her shoulders, his chin resting atop her curly hair. He wills himself not to feel guilty.

Becky was supposed to be eternally off limits. She threw out a welcome mat when she was a teenager, of course, but Tim littered the yard between them with so many "keep off" signs that he thought he'd successfully warded her off. From the beginning, he was determined to do right by Becky, the way he'd never done right by Tyra. The way he'd never done right by Jason. The way he'd never done right by Lyla. The way he'd never done right by anyone.

Well, he supposed he'd done right by his brother, and, by extension, his brother's family, which now numbered five children. And he'd done right by Julie once. Coach Taylor had called him _honorable_. That word had lodged somewhere in a sore corner of his heart, and he'd tried to live up to it.

Truth be told, though, it wasn't that hard to be honorable toward Becky. Not back then. He'd always preferred girls his own age or older. Becky was a child when she fell in love with him. But then, one day, suddenly…she wasn't. She was a woman. A married woman. And her husband was gone again, this time to the Third Gulf War. Or the fourth, depending on how you were counting.

That was when Tim began to notice Becky in a different way. The protective instinct remained, but it morphed. It became less brotherly. They talked often. He did carpentry work for her, on the new house she would share with Luke when he came back. Nothing happened between them. Not then.

Luke came back from the war, highly decorated, rapidly promoted, and already a Lieutenant General. He was wanted in the Capitol, to serve on this or that committee, but Becky had no desire to leave Texas, and since Luke was as often overseas as in D.C., he agreed Dillon could be home base, even though he didn't understand her desire. Luke was no farm boy anymore. He'd seen the world and wanted to see more of it, and he didn't understand why Becky didn't want to.

Luke came "home" to Dillon, though it was clear he didn't consider it "home" anymore, about sixteen weeks out of the year. Becky spent a few weeks with him in D.C., when she wasn't teaching first grade at East Dillon Elementary.

"Luke thinks I'm narrow," she told Tim one day while he repaired some exposed beams her house, which had been damaged during the fall-out of a tornado. "I know he does."

"You're not narrow," Tim muttered around the two nails he held in his mouth. "You're just simple." He slid one nail out and began hammering. "Nothing wrong with simple."

"He doesn't understand why anyone would want to stay in Texas forever. Especially not Dillon."

The hammer thudded loud against the wood. Tim took the second nail from his mouth. "I understand," he said.

Tim _tried_ not to do the dishonorable thing. He _tried_ to quit stopping by the house when he was done with the repairs "just to check in and make sure you're safe." He _tried_ to stop taking her to all those sit-down dinners at Garrity's Grill "just to use up all these gift certificates Buddy gave me at the grand opening last year." That night she finally kissed him, he _tried_ not to kiss back. When she tugged him inside, he _tried_ not to tug her shirt out of her skirt. And he _tried_ not to do it the next week, and the next.

At some point, he stopped trying. And then that afternoon Becky showed up, bearing beer, at the house he was helping to build for Tinker and his new wife, and she sat down on the unfinished wood steps with him, and she told him she was filing for divorce, he didn't try to talk her out of it. He just said, "Good" and drained his beer.

Tim was never friends with Luke, so the betrayal wasn't nearly as bad as that jagged knife he'd once thrust in Jason's back. Or maybe it _was_ worse, because at least Lyla and Jason weren't married.

Now, upstairs within their own house, a little boy sleeps. To this day, Tim doesn't know if the child is his or Luke's, and he doesn't want to know. Timmothy, Jr. calls him "My-pa," and that's all that matters. Because if Tim ever does right by anyone, he's going to do right by that boy.

Now they're married, and Tim knows Becky loves him, but not in the same way she did as an annoying, naïve, starry-eyed teenage girl. She loves him with the love of a woman who knows he's flawed but doesn't care, who isn't going to try to change him, because she wants the very same things he wants: an end to clawing ambition, to measuring sticks and medals, to trying to be more successful than everyone around you, to believing in dreams that probably won't come true and that don't even _need_ to come true. She wants what he wants: This state. This town. This land, unmowed, unshaped, unrefined, stretching out for mile upon predictable mile. This regular routine of holding bottles of cold-sweating beer while watching the silent sun set on a cricket-chorused evening.

Home.


	15. Retirement

**Chapter Fifteen**

For the next few weeks, Dr. Taylor endures the looks and snickers of her students in the lecture hall. Most people believe Coojoy Swainson's confession, but rumours that Coach Taylor made his assistant take the fall persist, and even if Coach's innocence is widely believed, that doesn't stop the tittering. The Texas Longhorns face off with the Oregon State Beavers in the Alamo Bowl, and that gives rise to endless sexual innuendos about longhorn and beavers. The churning media sea and the ripples of laughter are a major distraction for the team, and the Longhorns lose by a wide margin.

When Tami and Eric get into the hotel room after the bowl game, Eric goes straight for the mini bar. He usually never touches those things, irritated as he is by the injustice of the pricing, but tonight he pulls out two mini airport size bottles of scotch and pours them in a water glass and downs it. He, hisses, slams the glass down, takes off his cap and throws it hard against the wall, which causes Tami to jump a little. Then he throws himself down on his back lengthwise across the bed.

She comes and sits tentatively at the end of the bed, resting a hand on his knee. "Good game. Y'all played hard, hon."

"No we didn't! Don't lie to me!"

She winces. "You did the best you could given the distractions."

"I shouldn't have let it get to me. I should have been focused anyway. I should have got the team back on track. I should – "

"- Stop it! Just stop it!"

He sighs. She lies down beside him, turns on her side, and drapes an arm around his waist. "I haven't exactly been at the top of my lecture game either. I just ended my last class a half hour early and walked out."

He closes his eyes. She kisses his chin. "Can I do anything to relax you?" she asks, sliding her fingertips across his rib cage and settling them on the zipper of his pants. She doesn't know if it's the right suggestion. Fifteen years ago, it would have been, without question. Now, he might just feel it's another pressure on top of the one he's just been through. But she doesn't know how else to help him at the moment.

"Yeah. That might actually…yeah."

When they're under the covers later, he still feels tense. "Sorry," he mutters. "I don't have quite the discipline and endurance I used to."

"As long as you take care of me one way or the other, hon. And you always do." She kisses his shoulder and drapes a leg around him. His muscles feel like rocks beneath his skin. "Honey, did that help at all?"

"It helped while it lasted."

"Maybe we can go for two in an hour. Because God knows you'll still be awake."

His fingers trail down her bare back. "Maybe we should think about retiring. Move someplace remote…"

"Like where? Dillon?"

"Yeah," he says. "Land's cheap there. We could afford fifty acres. Build a small house. I could Coach Pee Wee. There's not that much media attention in Pee Wee."

"Not much money either."

"We've got quite a bit saved up. We could live for twenty years, if we live simply."

"And what if we live past eighty-five?" she asks. "Because I think we'll be out of money by then."

"Gracie will take us in, right?"

She laughs. "Well, the White House does have a lot of spare rooms. Except she might be done with her second term by then."

He smirks. "You're always complaining you don't have enough time to write with your course load. It'd be quiet on fifty acres. You could finally sort through all that research and put out that book you're always talking about. I bet it would make some money too. Just promise me you won't go on a book tour. Let's just keep the doors shut against the goddamn media."

She raises herself up to study his eyes. "You're serious about this, aren't you?"

"Yeah. I don't know…even before this circus, the media always had their noses in things. I'm starting to lose my love for football, and that's a god awful thing. If I could coach kids instead…see that early, pure joy, shape them from the ground up, you know…"

She strokes his cheek. "Well , I'll think about it, hon. I don't know if I'm ready to retire, but I sure don't want you to lose your first love."

He turns his head to kiss her hand. "You're my first love, Tami."

"You loved football long before we ever dated."

"I mean my first priority. You know that, don't you?"

"I've always known that." She bends down to kiss him. "Want to take a bath with me? That looked like a pretty sizeable tub. It even has jets. I'll wash your back. Work out some of those knots in your shoulders."

Later, they come back to the bed, clad in damp towels, and fool around a little bit without really going anywhere. They drift off to sleep. When Tami awakes a couple of hours later, she takes the still lightly damp towels crumpled in the bed and hangs them up on the towel rack in the bathroom. She pulls on some sweats and goes out onto the balcony. She just needs to breathe the night air, look at the sky, enjoy a moment of peace. But as soon as she steps out, from the ground six stories below, there comes a series of flashes from a small pound of reporters with their telescopic lenses. She immediately turns around, goes back inside, and pulls the blinds. Eric stirs, sits up, and orders Siri to turn on a light. He runs a hand through his unruly hair. "What's up?"

"I don't need to think about it anymore," she says. "Let's buy those fifty acres in Dillon. Let's do it tomorrow. And promise me if that new North Dillon high school tries to get you to be head coach, you'll stick with Pee Wee."

His hand falls from his head to the bed. "It's a deal, babe." He pats the bed. "Now C'mere." When she slides in next to him, he asks, "Want to finish what we started before we fell asleep?"

She yawns. "We'd have to start all over from the beginning."

He sighs. "Yeah. Maybe I'll wake you up early."

"No you will _not_. I'm sleeping in. But we don't have to check out until noon." She snuggles her head into the pillow and rolls her back to his. He does the same. As they lie back to back, beneath the heavy weight of the blankets, the peace descends.


	16. The Babysitter

The world dissolves around Matt when he's painting, and nothing can penetrate his private sphere. He's brought the monitor into the second bedroom he's converted into a studio and knows that if Baby Boy cries, eventually he'll hear the sound. The police and social workers are no closer to locating the baby's father, though Matt has begun to suspect one of his high school art students of being the father. Matt teaches at a private academy for troubled teens, just a few hours a week, and this particular young man began missing classes soon after the baby was discovered. When he finally returned (more than three skips, and you're expelled), he avoided eye contact the first few days. Matt has tried to retain him after class and make subtle inquiries, but the boy is not opening up. He thinks that today, he'll just ask the kid directly, though that could prove problematic if his hunch is wrong.

Light streams in through the many windows – the reason Matt chose this room – though to this day he still misses the high loft of their first Chicago apartment, his and Julie's first home together, when he was the one supporting her.

After dipping his brush in the black paint he adds one final flourish to the canvas. Just after he's lowered his trade tool back to the easel, he leaps to feel fingertips brushing the long, curled hair at the edge of his neck. Julie's been telling him he needs a haircut for weeks, but it's hard to make time now between art classes, painting, and the baby.

"Hey," he says as he turns. Julie is dressed in what he calls her "sexy librarian" work clothes, and he smiles when he sees her, but the smile fades in light of her sour expression. "What are you doing home so early?"

"They made a decision," she says, hands falling limply to her sides. "About the provost position. I didn't get it. So I thought I'd come home early and we'd drink the failure champagne." They'd bought a bottle in anticipation of celebrating her promotion.

Matt wipes his hands on a white cloth and then takes her into his arms, murmuring to her words of support and love and appreciation, telling her they were fools to pass her over, and not showing that part of him that is secretly happy, happy because she already works long enough hours as is and already makes too much compared to him.

They're just popping the pity champagne when the baby stirs and cries and Landry knocks twice before throwing open the front door and just walking in.

"Dude," Matt says as he emerges from the studio. However much Julie scolds him for use of that word, Matt hasn't dropped it in all these years. He'll be ninety and calling Landry dude. "What if we were having sex on the living room couch?"

"How long have you been married again?" Landry asks wryly.

Julie, who had trailed Matt into the living room, frowns.

"Hey, you wanted a babysitter, your sitter has arrived," Landry announces. "Don't you have to get to art class?"

"I'm calling in sick so I can stay home and commiserate with Julie. "

"She didn't get the provost gig?"

"Not everything is a _gig_, Landry," Julie mutters.

Matt goes to get the baby while Landry shares a glass of champagne with Julie, toasting her with, "When God closes a door, sometimes it's because there's a fire on the other side."

"I don't think that's the expression," Julie says as she clinks his glass with her own.

"Should be. Academic politics, Julie. You don't want more of that. You're not your sister. You're a tender violet."

This at least makes Julie laugh.

"Well, you're not your sister anyway." Landry drains his glass and as Matt emerges with baby boy cradled in his arms. "Why don't I take the little tyke for a walk in the stroller?" Landry asks. "Let you guys have some couch time. I won't just walk in this time when I come back."

Matt blushes. He can't believe he still blushes about sex with his own wife all these years later, but he can feel the heat in his cheeks. Of course, there isn't going to be any couch time, unless it's to hold his disgruntled wife, but she'll probably prefer to pace for a while. "Thanks, dude," he mutters, and Landry takes the stroller he bought the Saracens as a "fostering gift" and wrestles with it and kicks it until it finally falls open. "All the techonological advances in the world, and strollers are still a pain in the ass." He winces. He'd bought a stroller for Carter. They'd only had a chance to use it twice. He looks at baby boy as Matt lays him in the stroller and thinks how tired Matt looks, how maybe, after having done this twice at once for years, he doesn't have the energy to do it again, even if he wants to do the right thing. How maybe he and Julie deserve a little time to themselves. How he never got a chance to be a father himself.

"Off we go, Cruci." He's named the baby, against Matt and Julie's vigorous protests. Crucifictor is an even cooler, more ironic name for a kid than Curcifictorious is for a rock band, Landry reasons. It has a Latin ring to it, but you can shorten it to Cruci, which is affectionate and kind of cute. It's unique, and bound to spark a conversation with the girls, which, if he's as ordinary as Landry, he'll need. You can shorten it even further to Cru, which has a kind of edge to it. What's not to like? Landry maneuvers the stroller while Matt holds open the door for him.  
"You and Baby Boy have a good time."

"Me and Cru," Landry says. "Adorable little Cruci. Crucifictor only when he's in trouble."

"You know he'll never get laid with that name," Matt insists, but Landry's already halfway to the elevator.


	17. Located

**Author's Note:** Reviews are very welcome. I hope people are sticking with this story. I know it's a little...unusual for me, with so many characters and so far in the future. Hope you are enjoying it anyway.

**Chapter 17**

Landry understands that living in D.C. shortens Julie's commute to Obama U, but he never would have chosen to inhabit this wannabe city, with its roving bands of tourists all wearing their Google glasses, being directed from site to site by projected maps while listening to narration about the historical-political context of every rock and tree. He much prefers the three Arlington blocks to which he routinely confines himself.

He has to dodge the tourists with the stroller, popping wheelies, making moves like a running back. With those Google glasses, they don't pay attention to anything, unless they're alerted to the presence of an approaching friend or politician or celebrity. Landry suddenly remembers he forgot to turn off his location services on his iEverything, which will no doubt transmit his presence to the tourists, and there will be requests for autographs from the fifth richest man in America. Or so he likes to think. But businessmen and software developers aren't _really_ rockstars, not when they aren't flaunting their cash, and certainly not when they're pushing a stroller in khakis and a twenty-five year old Dillon Lion's T-shirt, not yet quite thread bare, but ripped under one arm.

He turns off the location services anyway, just as a tourist nearly bumps into him. Those damn glasses. Congress has outlawed their use while driving and is now considering a "distracted walking" bill. Grace Taylor is right about one thing as a politician – it seems everything is determined on a national level now. State and local governments are becoming increasingly passé – they exist primarily to enforce federal laws and receive federal aid. Landry thinks Grace is right on principle to oppose this move to nationalize almost everything, but he doesn't think she actually has a chance of stemming the tide. Adapt or die has been his motto for years.

He takes a brisk walk about the Mall but avoids the crowd of protestors beginning to spread out from the reflecting pool in front of the Washington Monument. "Anti-war protestors," he tells little Cruci. "Don't want us bothering with Golden Dawn." He hovers at the edge, however, several feet behind where the crowd is pooling, behind even the watchful row of Capitol Police, decked out in the newly designed red, white, and blue uniforms that had become the laughingstock of the D.C. metropolitan area, and listens as Congresswoman Taylor takes the podium and begins to address a suddenly cheering and then silenced crowd.

Grace Taylor has earned a lot of enemies, but she has her devoted fan base too, a weird medley of the youngest and oldest people interested in politics. She's something of a rock star politician in that sense.

"Yesterday morning," she tells the gathered crowd, "a bill was introduced to Congress to reinstitute the draft. It has the backing of all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and today General Luke Cafferty will be speaking on its behalf."

Landry hasn't seen Cafferty for fifteen years, except on T.V. He takes a few steps back with the stroller as the crowd begins chanting, "Down with Cafferty! Down with Cafferty!"

Gracie silences them. "General Cafferty is an honorable and brave man, and I won't have him personally insulted, but he's simply wrong about this. Aside from the fact that we need to bring our boys and girls home from the Mediterranean, there is the fact that a non-volunteer army is never as effective as a volunteer army. We must – "

As Grace goes on with her speech, Landry begins dragging the stroller backwards and telling Cruci, "Your first anti-war protest."

"Has there ever been a _pro_-war protest?"

Landry would recognize that voice anywhere. He jerks around to find a wryly smiling Tyra Collette, in sun glasses – not Google glasses, or, if they are, they're off, because he can't see the light glow behind the shades. Her blouse, as usual, is designed to draw eyes to her chest, and her navy blue skirt is skin tight. She looks nearly as good as she did when he married her, he thinks. He drags his eyes away. "So what? Are you stalking me now? All the way to D.C.?"

They begin walking away from the crowd.

"Don't flatter yourself," she replies. "I'm here to research a political thriller I'm working on."

"What? Branching out from chick lit?"

Tyra draws off her glasses slowly. "I _never_ wrote chick lit. Not that you'd know."

"I've read your books, Tyra. All of them."

A look of surprise and – pleasure? – flickers across her face, and then she suppresses it. "Well, you always did spend a lot of time in your _personal study_." She nods at the baby. "Playing Mr. Mom today?"

They fall into the old sarcastic banter as they walk another few blocks. She mentions that she hasn't seen Julie in over and suggests they all go out for dinner.

"Sure," he agrees. Why is she opening this door again? More to the point, why is he walking through it? _Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me._ He's been saying those words like a mantra ever since Tyra's out-of-the-blue phone call. What does she want, anyway? She has her own money now, from those books, and plenty of it, and she's never been a gold digger. Does she just want his forgiveness? Does she still love him, in some twisted , Tyra way of hers? Because she may well be researching a political thriller, but he doubts that's the only reason she showed up right on his heels.

When they get to Matt and Julie's apartment door, Landry doesn't walk in. Instead, he knocks loudly and yells, "Get dressed!" while Tyra rolls her eyes. He means it as a joke, of course, but Matt takes an extra long time to open the door, and when he does, he looks disheveled.

"Tyra," Matt says, "hey, this is a surprise."

"Good surprise or bad surprise?" she asks.

"Julie will be happy to see you." Matt opens the door wide. "Jules, Tyra's here."

Tyra pats him on the chest as she walks in and tugs against his shirt. "You buttoned it one off," she says, smirking.

Matt and Julie give Tyra a grand tour of the condo while Landry trails them, cradling Cruci. In the second bedroom studio, Tyra examines Matt's latest, three-quarters complete painting, a scene of the Capitol building, shrouded in dark clouds. "You ever let people use your art for book covers?" Tyra asks him.

"He happily lets people use his art to wipe their asses if they pay him enough," Landry says.

"True on the _lets_," Matt says, "but false on the _happily_. Book covers, though, that's good publicity I guess. It's not like I'm going to get critical recognition ever. Might as well settle for popular."

"It's fantastic." Tyra walks closer to the canvass and tilts her head left and then right to examine it. "I typically sell around 500,000 copies of each book, so that's an audience for you right there. I'll put you in touch with Lyla to work out the details."

Matt nods while Julie disappears to prepare herself for dinner.

Eating together at the restaurant is like sliding back into high school. Barbs and banter, laughter and familiarity. It feels right. Landry warns himself not to grow too comfortable, because they never last, these easy times with Tyra. The baby sits in a car seat on a sling-like stand beside the table, sucking his pacifier and looking from face to face, as though they're all insane, and perhaps they are. Where have their lives gone, and where are they going? Matt and Julie, starting all over with this baby, with diapers and bottles and late nights and early mornings? Landry, unable to keep his eyes off Tyra, returning to her like a dog drawn back to its own vomit.

Tyra throws back her head and laughs at something Matt just said, and Landry laughs too. It feels good. He glances at Cruci. It's not crazy, he tells the baby with the telepathy he's sure by now they share. It's not crazy to want to feel good, even if you know it can't last.


	18. Spinning

**Author's Note:** Hope someone is still reading this...I may have introduced too many plot lines...but I will try to tie them all up eventually.

**Chapter 18**

Luke Cafferty looks almost the farm boy as he makes his way down the D.C. streets this evening, out of uniform, clad in jeans and a flannel button-down and work boots, but that past is far behind him. He tries not to think of those early days, after he came back from Iraq and things were good between him and Becky for their first newlywed year. He was able to play at young love for a while, able almost to believe that innocence and sweetness were really possible, even if the war had already made him old.

Years later, Becky had the divorce papers served to his Alexandria, Virginia townhouse, a week before he was supposed to come "home" to Dillon for a month. "How could you do it without any warning at all?" he'd screamed at her on the phone, and she'd said, in that soft, quiet way of hers, "There's been years of warning." He'd simply hung up, because he couldn't say it wasn't true.

It was Becky's cheating that angered him the most. That was one thing he'd never done, despite all their time apart and plentiful opportunity. He had his eye on Gracie a few months before the divorce papers came, but he never acted on it. He was fascinated by the young Congresswoman's courage and raw beauty, which made such a sharp contrast to Becky's timidness and cuteness. Luke had loved Becky – still partly loved her – but it was the old Luke who loved her, a Luke that had been buried little by little in each of the wars.

His respect and desire for Gracie Taylor was a very private craving at first, and he didn't think Gracie noticed. But the day after the divorce papers came, when she summoned him for a meeting (she'd summoned him for a lot of meetings, working as she did against the war he was helping to wage), he stood a little too close to her, and he felt the heat come off of her, saw her tremble just the slightest bit, and knew she wanted him too. They had each the first time right there in her office, on a quickly cleared desk, and that was where most of their subsequent trysts occurred. If he was seen coming out of her office, everyone would think they'd just been engaged in some political debate.

When Luke came to meet the moving truck in Dillon to clear out the last of his things from the house, Tim made himself scarce, but Luke tracked him down at Buddy's bar, the first one, not the one at Garrity's Grill. They fought each other in the parking lot, because Luke felt he had to, but it wasn't at all satisfying. Tim just took the first blow. And the second. After that, Luke walked away. What was the point?

Now, as he makes his way to Grace's condo, he wears the half-familiar clothes of his youth. It's rare that he meets her outside her office, and he knows she doesn't want him to be recognized coming and going from her doorstep, so he's shed the uniform.

He hasn't spoken to her in weeks, not since he told he was tired of being in the shadows. Maybe he hoped she'd take those words to heart and they could have a real relationship, as close to a real relationship as two people like them could ever have. She was younger, so much younger than Becky, and yet so much less innocent. In a way, Grace understood him. They understood each other. There were times they didn't even _like_ each other, but they _understood_ each other; they knew each other's deep down secret places, where the fears and the anger dwell.

Luke doesn't know why Gracie has summoned him now, after weeks of silence. She does it through messengers, subordinates, as if she were the general, and not him. He assumes the sex between them is over, but he still imagines it at night, repeats the past like a reel, because it's his only distraction from the war.

The war. She probably wants to talk him out of the draft, which is about to become law. She'll want him to retract his support, but he won't bow on this. She thinks World War III will be prevented if the U.S. stays aloof, or at least prevented for the U.S. She thinks that since America is not itself being invaded, the country can just keep floating in a churning sea that is growing dark with other people's blood. She admits Golden Dawn won't stop with Turkey, that Spain is next, but she still doesn't think that's our concern. Golden Dawn will content itself with the Mediterranean, and if the Mediterranean doesn't want its brand of tyranny, it will have to defend itself.

Gracie thinks tyrannies are best brought down by trade. She'd trade water with the devil and argue it dampened his fire. She says blue jeans brought down the Soviet empire, and internet porn toppled the United Muslim Brotherhood (the last war's threat). It's a nice thought, and maybe there's some truth to it, but when people are dying – when they are at this very moment dying – you can't _defend_ them with blue jeans.

And Luke _has_ to defend someone, because that was his first failure as a man - the failure to defend. He couldn't even defend his own unborn child. Despite the love that bloomed early and lingered long for Becky, that failure always haunted their marriage.

He comes up the back stairs of the condo complex. He has a key card, though he's rarely used it. This is only the fourth time he's met her here, and she's never been to his townhouse. She's waiting for him, but not in the sexy red silk robe she's always worn when he comes here. She's all business – black skirt to the knees, long blonde hair tumbling over the front of a blouse that is the pale orange color that is so popular this year. She has her shoes off at least, like any woman would at home, a small touch of normalcy. She hands him a glass of wine immediately and tells him to sit at her avant garde, jet black, curved kitchen table, but she doesn't pour herself anything.

He doesn't touch the wine. It sits in front of him on the table's slick coated wood surface, a few inches from his fingertips, while she tells him she's pregnant.

Maybe the words don't quite register with him, or maybe it's habit for him to slip into command mode, but he's very calm. He says, "You said you were on the pill."

"You heard about the federal recall."

He had. Defective pills. The FDA issued a warning, and the Department of Health announced it would offer free, over-the-counter second-chance pills to anyone who asked for the next month. The pills worked to cause a fairly painless miscarriage for up to three weeks after pregnancy. However, the last time he and Gracie had sex was four weeks ago.

Gracie has just dropped a bomb on him, but he is always calm under fire. "And you didn't get a second-chance pill?"

"No." She doesn't explain herself. That's Gracie for you. Say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no. Don't sugar coat it, wrap it in sound bites, or justify it. Own it.

"The pregnancy," he says. "You have what, four more weeks to terminate it? I suppose you want money." Not that she can't afford it herself, between her congressional salary and her publication credits. But God knows she won't want to keep it. A baby would interfere with her career, would chain her ambition. Not to mention the political scandal.

Gracie applauded the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, but not because she opposed choice in the matter. Some liberals supported the overturn because of the population decline that was destroying the social safety net. Most conservatives supported it because they opposed abortion. But Sovereignty Party members such as Gracie supported the overturn only because they thought abortion should be regulated state by state and not by the federal government. Within the states, SP members tended to support absolute liberty of choice. The irony was that after Roe vs. Wade was overturned, the states didn't get to regulate abortion. Instead, Congress passed a national law outlawing abortion after the first eight weeks, and the Supreme Court upheld it.

"You're certain it's mine?" he asks.

"I haven't had sex with anyone else in a year."

Luke's not sure how he feels about her aborting their child. He can't imagine them married, raising a child together, while they both try to save the world from tyranny, each in their own very different way. At the same time, he doesn't want to go through this all over again.

Luke has nightmares about the wars he's been in, of course, but they don't bother him long after he wakes. The nightmares that linger are the ones of a whispy, vague, nameless baby that dissolves like vapor in the air when he reaches out to touch it. He would have stepped up for Becky if she had made a different choice. He would have married her in high school, and maybe their marriage would have had a different fate. Or maybe not. Maybe their divorce simply would have torn a child's heart in half and toppled his fragile sense of stability. Luke doesn't know, and that's the point – he can never know.

He and Becky tried to have a child three years after they were married, but she didn't get pregnant, and they were apart so often, that they didn't try as frequently as most couples. They didn't seek any fertility help. They just assumed it would happen, eventually. Maybe, despite his early, one-night-stand virility, he was shooting blanks after the war, because after Becky hooked up with Tim, she got pregnant. Becky assured him the child was Tim's, and Luke didn't demand a paternity test. Timing wise, Luke _could_ have been the father, but Becky was leaving him and taking the child. Better to assume it was Tim's and leave it at that.

"I'm not getting an abortion."

It takes Luke a full minute to process her words, because they are the last words he expected her to say. He asks her to repeat herself.

"I'm having the child, and I'm keeping it. I don't believe in abortion."

"What? I thought you opposed the national law outlawing it after eight weeks."

"I do. Because I don't believe in government force either."

He runs his fingers through his hair, light brown now, darkened with time, like his soul. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing. Unless…" Her voice hitches. Gracie's voice doesn't _hitch_. He looks straight at her and sees that she is controlling some emotion, her blue eyes a hardening mask. She swallows. "Unless there's something you particularly _want_ to give. I'm not _asking_ anything of you, though." She slides back her chair. "I thought it was right that you should know." She stands, tells Siri to turn on the light in the kitchen cabinets, and draws down an empty glass. She gets herself water from the door of the fridge and half peers at him at the table on the other side of the kitchen counter, where he sits, trying not to look at her, gripping his unsipped wine glass by the stem, as though if he doesn't, he'll fall off the spinning world.


	19. Choices

**Author's Note:** I'm moving soon, and there were no reviews for the last two chapters anyway, so I'm just going to wrap this story up. This is the last official "chapter," but it will be followed by a brief epilogue.

**Chapter 19**

D.C. was rapidly developed by businessmen after it became a state. The federal government moved about half of its offices into less expensive regions of Maryland and Virginia, leaving the old space to be renovated for condos and hotels. The Capitol and its offices remained, but everything from the Department of Education to the Federal Trade Commission moved out. Given the events of September 11, 2001 and December 7, 2016, the Fed gradually decided it would also be a security advantage to spread out the seats of federal government, although the renewed Al Qaeda is now a U.S. ally in the war against Golden Dawn.

Speculators overestimated the need for development in D.C. and did not predict the full extent of the impending labor shortage, and now many of the hotels stand empty. Tyra's, however, is bustling, because it's the best hotel in D.C., an artsy, green glass building constructed ten years ago with all of the newest technology. Tyra asked Landry to walk her here after dinner. "The sun's set," she told him. "I'd feel safer if you walked me."

Tyra can damn well walk herself to her hotel, but she knows the damsel in distress routine works with guys. Of course, Landry really _was_ her knight in shining armor once, years ago, in high school, except that most knights, after they slay the dragon, don't hide the evidence of their victory and then spend the next year in a crisis of conscience. God, it's been almost five years since she's thought about that. She hashed it out in counseling, in her early thirties, finally.

Of course, that wasn't really how Landry rescued her. He was her knight all right, but not because he spared her from some external rapist. He saved her from herself. He believed in her, when no one else but Mrs. Taylor seemed to. (_Dr._ Taylor, now. Tyra will never get used to that.) Early abandoned by her father, Tyra had always longed for the approval of men, but she'd mostly sought it through sex. Sex alone, however, wasn't enough for Landry. To impress him, she had to grow. And then, once her dungeon chains were broken by his slow, undramatic chiseling, she left her knight standing in the dust. She did it again almost two decades later. And now he's standing in front of her hotel room door, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his khaki dockers, waiting for…what? Is part of him still waiting for her, after all these years? Or has she finally, in her long slow war with herself, killed off her truest ally-Landry's love for her?

Until she called, they hadn't spoken in a very long time. He has a life, and she isn't in it, but she hasn't stopped thinking about him. She hasn't stopped comparing other men to him. She hates him for the way he crawled into himself after Carter died and left her out in the lonely cold of solitary grief, but she loves him for the way he alone knows her pain and her past and her hopes and her longings. You think you can walk away from years of arguments, small and large, from intertwined hopes and dreams, from shared disappointments, but it's like being wrapped in a tangled spool of thread and foolishly believing you can ever unravel every last strand. You can't. That shit clings.

"Want to come in for a nightcap?" she asks.

Landry smiles in the way that only he smiles – where his lip actually turns down on one side. "Did you really just use that word? Nightcap?"

"You know when and where my last book was set. Sometimes I just fall into it myself. The time. The place."

He raises an eyebrow. "The character?" Her last book featured a psychopathic female protagonist.

"Well, every character has some element of myself. I hope I'm not a psychopath, but…I know I haven't always put others first." She waits for him to offer some quick-witted, sarcastic confirmation, but he doesn't. He just stands there and looks at her. "Nightcap?" she repeats.

He sighs. "You know, I can go out tonight and find a hot twenty-six year old sweet young thing to have sex with me."

Of course he could. And it's not just the money. Landry is one of those rare men who gets better looking with age. He wasn't the best looking guy in high school, not in a town full of pretty boy athletes. But he's in the same decent physical shape he was in high school, and his skin is completely clear now, and his hair hasn't thinned an inch, and its darkening shade makes him look distinguished. He's a fine looking man.

Tyra shrugs. "And as long as she doesn't open her mouth, I'm sure you'll have a good time." She waves her key fob in front of the hotel door, lowers the handle, and pushes it open. "I'm not twenty-six, and I'm not as hot as I used to be, but I know _exactly_ what you like."

She walks in and lets the door shut behind herself. She makes sure it's unlocked it. Tyra drops her purse on the desk and kicks off her high heels. She guesses she's used up all her take backs, because Landry doesn't follow her. She peels off her panty hose, balls them up, and tosses them in the trash can, because they have a run. She tells Siri to turn on the desk light and call room service. She'll order champagne and drink the entire bottle herself to celebrate letting go of Landry, to forget her stupidity in thinking she should simply look him up again and somehow resurrect flame from ash.

She's turning to the phone speaker that's built into the wall just above the desk when she hears the door open and slide clicking shut. Before she can turn around, Landry's hands are on the wall on either side of her, and he clicks end call on the phone's keypad. Then he slides hand to her hips, moves her slightly to the left, away from the keypad, and pushes her against the wall. He nips from her neck upward, his still familiar lips tickling her flesh, and then bites her earlobe gently, pulling it softly between his teeth as he moves a hand from her hip to the hem of her skirt and slides it up. His breath low in her ear, he says, "I like it like this."

"I know." After all those years on and off - and the desert in between them - she knows. He'll want it hard and fast the first time, and then slow and tender the second. He won't say he's angry with her, and he won't say he adores her, but she'll know the first from the way he fucks her and the second from the way he makes love to her. "I know."

**/FNL/**

Landry's on the balcony in the morning, staring at the street below, covered with roving tourists. Tyra comes out with the thick, plush hotel robe tied tightly around herself and slides an arm around his waist.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when Carter died." He's looking at the street as he speaks, not at her. "You needed me, and I didn't see it."

"Thank you," she says. "Thank you for admitting that. And I'm sorry I…I'm sorry I gave up. When it came to school, I stopped being a quitter. I succeeded in college. But I never stopped being a quitter when it came to relationships. I…I'm forty-five, Landry. I want to quit quitting."

He slides away from her touch and studies the cement on the balcony. "That was great last night, Tyra, but I don't know if I can do this again."

"We won't be doing it again. This is the _last_ time. No more quitting."

He steps away from the banister and leans back against the solid glass wall by the sliding door, his arms crossed defensively over his chest. "How can I believe that, Tyra? How can you _expect_ me to believe that?"

"I can't," she admits, and leaves him alone on the balcony, alone with himself, to make his decision.

**/FNL/**

Landry leans over the balcony. Horns honk in the street fifteen stories below, but not often. It isn't New York. D.C. is still something of a faux city. Despite the business renovation, his home in Arlington is still more developed. It's quite possible Tyra is going to break his heart a third time. Or would this be the fourth? He supposes it depends how one is counting. But he's got a penthouse condo that's too big for one person, and the women he's brought there haven't stayed long, because he doesn't want them to. He's been with unintelligent, hot girls that he can't have a conversation with, whose minds don't leap like Tyra's. And he's been with sweet, semi-smart, pretty girls, who treat him well but don't keep him on his toes – who simply bore him in time. He's never found anyone quite like Tyra, who's smart, and beautiful, and exciting, but with a biting wit.

He wasn't the perfect husband, certainly not after Carter died, but he wasn't a bad husband either. He knows he deserves more than a woman who keeps spitting him out. He doesn't really believe she _means_ to make it stick this time. Well, he does. She means it. She's always _meant_ it at the time. But intentions never predict outcomes. This could end badly again.

But he's forty-five. And he's tired of his empty life, the money that can't buy happiness, the parade of women who aren't Tyra, a world without permanent ties. And this time, Tyra's come after him. For the first time, she's come after him. The hunted has finally become the hunter. Maybe she's as tired and lonely as he is.

He's distracted from his thoughts by the ringing of his iEverything. It's Matt, who tells him that he found the father of the child, an art student whose girlfriend took off and left the baby on his door step, which gave him the idea to leave it on Matt's. The boy is sixteen. He doesn't have a job, though he can probably find one without much trouble in this market. Still, he doesn't know how to be a father, let alone a single father.

"So…what's next?" Landry asks. He feels a sudden pang. He's only been a baby sitter for Cruci for a few weeks, but he doesn't want the child to vanish from his life. He's grown very fond of the baby.

"The police and social worker are talking to him now," Matt said. "I confronted him at my 8 AM art class this morning. I've been suspecting for a while. He's going to put the kid up for adoption. He'll face some kind of charges for child abandonment, but I asked the cops to go easy on him. Since we're foster parents, we can apply for full adoption and potentially legally have him in less than six months under the Expedited Adoption Act."

"And that's what you're going to do?" Cruci can still be a part of his life. Landry can be _cool Uncle Landry_.

Matt sighs. "We…we thought this was going to be temporary. I recently got two art commissions that are going to be a lot of work, and Julie is building her career, maybe be provost of another school now that she wasn't chosen for Obama U, and with that book cover for Tyra, my art career could finally take off, and we've been through this for eighteen years, and Julie and I finally have time alone together, and I thought…we thought it would be temporary."

"So you _aren't_ going to adopt him?" Cruci really could be out of his life forever. Gone, like Carter.

"I…we'll have to think about it."

Landry stands up straight on the balcony. Maybe it isn't Tyra he needs. Maybe that empty spot his soul can't be filled by a mere woman. Maybe it's family he truly longs for. "What if…what if I adopted him?"


	20. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

Coach Eric Taylor holds open the door of the SUV for his wife, and she smiles at him as she climbs inside. He does that more often than he did when they were younger, because he's learned how much the little things matter, how they reassure her about the big things. So many of their friends' marriages have fallen apart in the last fifteen to twenty years, while they've stayed strong through the ups and downs. He reflects on that some nights, with a warm gratitude and a quiet contentment.

Once he's shut the door, he takes a few steps away from the vehicle and towards Tim, who is standing outside his house, a white, 2,000-square foot, two-story country-style affair with wrap-around porch. Coach Taylor nods to Becky as she disappears inside with a gentle wave.

"So, Monday then?" Coach says.

Tim nods. The young man is a master carpenter now. (Coach Taylor still thinks of Tim as a "young man," even though Riggins is well over forty; after all, Tim looks thirty and still carries himself with a relaxed air). Tim will be over Monday to put the finishing touches on the Dillon lake house Eric and Tami have already inhabited, though half of their belongings remain in boxes.

"And Pee Wee?"

Tim shakes his head.

"Think about it some more."

The two men shake hands, and Eric climbs in the SUV and tells it to start. He's still not happy with this voice recognition car technology they started introducing three years ago. For the longest time, he refused to sell his 2015 SUV, even when it was getting well on in miles, but he gave in when they moved back to Dillon. More to the point, Buddy Garrity gave him a fantastic deal. In addition to the bar and the restaurant, the man has re-opened his old car dealership, though his son Buddy, Jr. is managing two of the three businesses, and Buddy's still trying to talk Lyla into "coming home" to run the third. Lyla, however, is content being a literary agent in the Big Apple. Besides, her husband's comic book publishing business is based there. "People still make comic books?" Tami asked when Buddy told them.

"Boys will be boys," Buddy replied. "And to think she wanted a man who's more mature than Tim."

Tami asked, "You don't like your son-in-law?" and Buddy admitted he did, that the "kid" must be smart to be able to make a living at a nearly dead business and that he treated Lyla well. But he wants his girl to return to Dillon. Buddy's had one heart attack too many and he just can't handle even one businesses himself anymore.

Coach Taylor thinks about that, too, about what it must be like for Buddy to age alone, with only his cash to comfort him. Eric doesn't mind that he and Tami have tossed aside their six-figure salaries for a simple life in a small town, for more time to enjoy each other's company in their twilight years. "A more relaxed lifestyle," Tami calls it. They'll live on their retirement here, and Tami may make a little off the psychology book she's already started writing. Eric's Pee Wee coaching stipend is enough to keep him in beer for two or three months of the year.

As they drive back home, Tami says, "So, did Tim agree to assistant coach for you?"

"He says he doesn't have the time, between his kid and work, but I think I'll wear him down."

"Well, I bet you can always call up Stan Taub."

"I wonder if he' still in Dillon." Eric chuckled. Coach Taub's energies and personality might actually be better suited for children than teenagers. Eric had always been rather humorless about Stan, but the guy had grown on him by the end of his stint with the Lions. Coach Taylor even half missed him when we moved to Phili. "I haven't thought of Stan in years."

Tami puts a hand on his knee. "Well, maybe you should see if he's still around. I'm sure he'd love to work with the great Coach Taylor again."

His lip curves in a half-annoyed smile at being teased.

"And when you fire your assistant the first day on the job, hon, it puts you in a bit of a bind, doesn't it?"

"I don't know if you can fire someone who's not paid," he mutters.

When he returned to Dillon, Coach Taylor was immediately offered the head coaching position at both Dillon High and the newly opened North Dillon High, but he drew his lines clear and hard. He was only coaching part-time. He was done with the politics of football. He was returning to the innocent roots of the game. Pee Wee. He'd gone into it with enthusiasm, but he wasn't thrilled with the assistant coach. Eric was deadly serious about football, but even he recognized that kids were kids, that you had to let them have some fun and not be too obsessed with the completion at this age. You needed to let them fail, of course, but you couldn't tear them down. He was afraid his assistant (whom he'd inherited and not hand selected) was going to kill the love of the game in the hearts of those little guys, and he'd come back to Dillon precisely so _he_ wouldn't lose the love himself. "Well I've got to find someone. Someone's got to take over for me that week we're gone for the wedding."

Neither he nor Tami had mentioned to Becky that their daughter was marrying Becky's ex-husband. It didn't seem like appropriate dinner conversation, and Coach Taylor supposed Becky had already heard or soon would.

The announcement came as a shock to both parents. Eric came home to their house on the UT campus after submitting his resignation letter one evening, and Tami was digging through the mail. She pulled out a square, white envelope and said, "I wonder who's getting married? One of my students, maybe?"

He'd been busy popping the cap off a beer when she broke open the seal with a sharp gold UT letter opener. Eric dropped the bottle opener with a clatter on the floor when Tami screamed, "What the hell? _**This**_ is how she tells us?"

Eric and Tami had both assumed Gracie would never marry. She'd never shown much interest in romantic relationships. She'd never been one of those girls who wrote her first name next to the last name of all the boys she liked, or who made lists of the names of the children she would one day have. She'd turned down four requests for her junior prom, and six for her senior prom. Eric had once, in a hushed whisper, asked Tami if she thought Gracie might be gay, and Tami had just laughed. Eric had been alternately relieved, and then terrified, when she finally brought home a boy during spring break the first year of college, but the relief quickly turned to tension when the kid tried to sneak from the guest bedroom into Gracie's, Eric caught him and reminded him he was a _guest _and ought to show some_ respect,_ and Gracie ended up leaving the Taylor house with her boyfriend in a tiff. Gracie was done with the kid a month later, but she never brought another boy home.

Tami knew more than Eric did about her daughter's love life, but not much more. She certainly didn't know Gracie had any interest in General Luke Cafferty. The marriage seemed strangely rushed, and when Eric wondered aloud if Gracie was pregnant, Tami said, "An unplanned pregnancy? In this day and age? _Gracie_? Hon, don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not being ridiculous. What other explanation could there be?"

"It's probably a political move somehow. They'll have one of those Washington marriages." She sighed. "I thought we set a good example for marriage for her. I really did."

Eric put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Maybe she actually loves him. Or maybe at least having someone, _anyone_, will make her life a little richer. It's a lonely sort of calling she's chosen."

"Maybe marriage will soften her."

Eric let his hand drop and winced. "I don't get the impression Luke's a soft man. Not anymore. Not since he was a kid. But he's…he's honorable. I know that. I guess we can take comfort in that."

"Maybe there sharp edges will blunt each other."

"Maybe."

Part of Coach Taylor is a little excited about becoming a grandfather again. (He's sure his suspicions are right, even if Tami laughs them off. She never has given him sufficient credit for his insights into their girls.) It'll be fun to spoil a grandbaby again, now that Lori and Ann are almost out of college.

He knows he and Tami won't see Gracie's child as often as they'd like, but if they volunteer to let the tyke stay a week or two and Dillon here and there, he's sure Gracie will see it as a welcome relief from parenting. He knows he and Tami would have, long ago, if either of them had ever had involved parents themselves. Gracie will be even more motivated to send her child Dillon-way since Matt and Julie are moving back too. Matt wants to return so he can paint west Texas landscapes. He's finally starting to make a name for himself as an artist, not based on his Chicago or D.C. work or any of the abstract pursuits, but a handful of old, raw, achingly beautiful landscapes he painted on a trip back to Dillon ten years ago. They just sold last month, and there was some kind of resultant buzz in the "art world." Matt wants to paint more now, and Julie says she's done with college politics, much sooner than her own mother was.

Julie's going to be a high school teacher at the new North Dillon High.

"There's plenty of politics in high school," Tami warned her, and Julie said, "I know. I know. But Dillon is a place where I can make a real difference. There are people I can help to escape this town."

Tami laughed, because of course the four of them were coming right back to it, and quite contentedly too.

"Strange world," Eric mutters, leaning his head back against the black headrest of the SUV and looking out the front windshield at the flat landscape, which is slowly changing as they near the lake. It is a strange world in which Landry Clarke's adopted a kid and become a single father by choice. He's dating that girl Tyra again, but Tami says Julie says he's taking it slowly, that there's no telling if they'll remarry.

Eric lowers a hand from the wheel and wraps it around Tami's hand on his knee and squeezes hard. "I'm glad some things never change." He looks at her gently and she smiles back just as gently. "You're my rock, babe."

"Forever and ever," she murmurs, and they unlock their eyes from one another to look at the familiar red orange glow of the setting sun, the full circle coming back around to rest.

**THE END**


End file.
